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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

A HOMAGE TO RABINDRANATH TAGORE
□ FROM INDIA AND THE WORLD □

IN CELEBRATION OF HIS SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

EDITED BY RAMANANDA CHATTERJEE
PUBLISHED BY THE GOLDEN BOOK COMMITTEE
CALCUTTA 1931

THE golden' book OF TAGORE

JIM

FOREWORD

A long with the readers o£ this volume and the members of the Golden Book of
Tagore Committee, I am grateful to and cordially thank the ladies and
gentlemen who have contributed to it, as they have enabled all of us thereby to
have some idea of the genius, personality and achievement of Rabindranath Tagore.
But these are so great and many-sided that a complete appraisal of them is hardly
practicable within any manageable compass. Nevertheless, I, too, on whom has
been conferred the honour of editing this book, must venture to write briefly what
1 know of the Poet—if only in obedience to a natural public desire.

Rabindranath Tagore is our greatest poet and prose-writer. Son of a
Maharshi (a “great seer”), and himself a seer and sage, he belongs to a family
the most gifted in Bengal in the realms of religion, philosophy, literature,
music, painting, and the histrionic art. There is no department of Bengali literature
that he has touched which he has not adorned, elevated, and filled with inspiration
and lighted up by the lustre of his genius. Difficult as it undoubtedly would be to
give an exhaustive list of his multifarious achievements from early youth upwards—
for his is a many-sided and towering personality, even the departments of literature
and knowledge which he has touched and adorned would make a pretty long list.
The late Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Sastri, M.A., D.LITT., C.I.E., said of
the Poet in the course of his presidential address at the preparatory meeting for the
Tagore Septuagenary Celebrations;

He has tried all phases of literature—couplets, stanzas, short poems, longer
pieces, short stories, longer stories, fables, novels and prose romances, dramas, farces,
comedies and tragedies, songs, operas, kirtans, palas, and, last but not least, l}'ric
poems. He has succeeded in every phase of literature he has touched, but he has
succeeded in.the last phase of literature beyond measure. His essays are illuminating,
his sarcasmsTiting, his satires piercing. His estimate of old poets is deeply apprecia¬
tive, and his grammatical and lexicographical speculations go further inward than
those of most of us.

Tennyson, in his poem addressed to Victor Hugo, called that great French
author “Victor in Drama, Victor in Romance, Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes
and fears,” “Lord of human tears,” “Child-lover,” and “Weird Titan by thy winter

weight of years as yet unbroken.” All these epithets and many more can be

rightly applied to Rabindranath Tagore.

Many works and some kinds of works of Rabindranath in Bengali have not yet
been translated into English or thence into other Western and Eastern languages.
In the translations, moreover, much, if not all, of the music, the suggestiveness, the

iii

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

undefinable associations clustering round Bengali words and phrases, and the aroma,
racy o£ Bengal and India, of the original has been lost. No doubt, the translations
of the poems and dramas—particularly when done by the Poet himself, have often
gained in directness, in the beauty and sublimity of simplicity, and in the music and
strength belonging to the English or other language of the translations. But
admitting all this, one is still constrained to observe that, for a correct estimate and
full appreciation of Rabindranath’s intellectual and literary powers, his gifts and
genius, it is necessary to study both his original works in Bengali and their English
translations as well as his original works in English like Personality, Sadhana, and
The Religion of Man. What high estimates of Tagore as an author many competent
judges have formed without the advantage of reading his Bengali works, will appear
from their contributions to this volume.

The music of his verse, and often of his prose as well, which fills the outer ear,
is but an echo of the inner harmony of humanity and the universe—“the music of
the spheres’’—which exists at the heart of things and which he has caught and made
manifest by his writings. How wonderfully full of real life and colour and motion
and variety they are! His hymns and sermons and some of his other writings let
us unconsciously into the secret of his access to the court of the King of kings, nay
to His very presence, and of his communion with Him. His hymns and other
writings in a spiritual vein have, therefore, brought healing to many a troubled soul.

Insight and imagination are his magic wands, by whose power he roams where
he will and leads his readers thither, too. In his works Bengali literature has out'
grown its provincial character and has become fit to fraternize with world literature.
Universal currents of thought and spirituality have flowed into Bengal through his
writings.

In philosophy he is not a system-builder. He is of the line of our ancient
religio-philosophical teachers whose religion and philosophy are fused components of
one whole. Both his poetry and prose embody his philosophy—the latest prose-work
in English being The Religion of Man.

But he is not simply a literary man, though his eminence as an author is such
that for a foreigner the Bengali language would be worth learning for his writings
alone.

It does not in the least detract from his work as a musician to admit that he is
not an ustad or “expert” in music, as that term is understood in common parlance.
He has such a sensitive ear that he appears to live in two worlds—one, the world of
visible forms and colours, and another, which one may call the world of sound-forms
and sound-colours. His musical genius and instinct are such that his achievement
in that art has extorted the admiration of many “experts.” This is said not with
reference only to his numerous hymns and patriotic and other songs and the tunes
to which he has himself set them, or to his thrilling, sweet, soulful and rapt singing in
different periods of his life, but also in connection with what he has done for

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

absolute music. He is not only the author of the words of his songs, possessed of
rare depth of meaning and suggestiveness and power of inspiration, but is also the
creator of what may be called new airs and tunes.

Six years ago, I had the good fortune to be present at some of the meetings in
Germany and Czechoslovakia where he recited some of his poems. His recitations
were such that even when the poems recited were in a language not understood by
the vast majority of the audience, he had to repeat them several times at the earnest
request of the hearers. Those who have heard him read his addresses and deliver
his extempore speeches and sermons in Bengali know how eloquent he could be as a
speaker, though his delivery in years past was often so rapid and his sentences
branched out in such bewildering luxuriance as to make him the despair of reporters.

He is a master and a consummate teacher of the histrionic art. Those who
have seen him appear in leading roles in many of his plays have experienced how
natural and elevating acting can be. From the prime of his manhood upwards he
has been in the habit of reading out his new poems, discourses, short stories, plays
and novels to select circles. On such occasions, too, his elocution and histrionic
talents come into play.

If it is true that the credit of reviving music in public for respectable women
goes to the Brahma Samaj, that credit belongs in great part to the Tagore family and
Rabindranath Tagore. They have also made it possible for girls and women of
respectable classes to act in public. The poet has also rehabilitated in Bengal dancing
by respectable girls and women as a means of self'expression and innocent amusement
and play.

Tagore’s patriotic songs arc characteristic. They are refined and restrained,
and free from bluff, bravado, bluster and boasting. Some of them twine their
tendrils round the tenderest chords of our hearts, some enthrone the Motherland as
the Adored in the shrine of our souls, some sound as a clarion call to our drooping
spirits filling us with hope and the will to do and dare and suffer, some call on us
to have the lofty courage to be in the minority of one ; but in none are heard the
clashing of interests, the warring passions of races, or the echoes of old, unhappy,
far-off historic strifes and conflicts. In many of those written during the stirring
times of the Swadeshi agitation in Bengal more than a couple of decades ago, the
Poet spoke out with a directness which is missed in many of his writings, though
not in the Katha'O'Kahini ballads which make the heart beat thick and fast and
the blood tingle and leap and course swiftly in our veins.

To Andrews Fletcher of Sal ton, a famous Scottish patriot, is attributed the
authorship of the observation that “if a man were permitted to make all the ballads,
he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.” He is generally quoted,
however, as having said so with respect to songs. Both ballads and songs have much
to do with the making of nations. Rabindranath’s songs and ballads—the former to
a greater extent than the latter, have been making Bengal to no small extent and will

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

continue to mould the character of Bengalis, literate and illiterate, town-dwellers and
village folk, and their culture and civilization. But it is not merely as a maker of
songs that he has taken part in the Swadeshi movement. His socio-political
addresses, the annual fairs suggested or organized by him, are part of the same
national service. He has worked earnestly for the revival of weaving and other
arts and crafts of the country—particularly village arts and crafts, and contributed
his full share to making education in India Indian as well as human and humane
in the broadest sense, and to the sanitation, reconstruction, reorganization and
rejuvenation of villages. Even official reports have praised him as a model landlord
for his activities in these directions in his estate.

His scheme of Constructive Non-co-operation, as outlined in some of his writings
and addresses about a quarter of a century ago, was part of his Swadeshi movement
politics. The “no-tax” campaign adumbrated in his play Paritran (“Deliverance”)
and the joyful acceptance of sufEering and chains by its hero, Dhananjay Bairagi,
are his idea of what political leaders should do on such occasions.

As he has denounced Nationalism in his book of that name, taking the word to
mean that organized form of a people which is meant for its selfish aggrandizement,
even at the expense of other peoples by foul, cruel and unrighteous means, and as
he is among the chief protagonists of what is, not quite appropriately, called
Internationalism, his profound and all-sided love of the Motherland, both as
expressed in words and as manifested in action, has sometimes not been evident
perhaps to superficial observers. But those who know him and his work and the
literature he has created, know that he loves his land

“with love far-brought
From out the storied Past, and used
Within the Present, but transfused
Thro’ future time by pow'er of thought.”

His penetrating study of and insight into the history of India and Greater India
have strengthened this love.

The origin of what is called his Internationalism has sometimes been traced to
his revealing and disappointing experiences during the Anti-partition and Swadeshi
movement of Bengal of the first decade of this century. Such experiences are not
denied. But his love and interest in the affairs of the whole of humanity are trace¬
able even in his writings of his boyhood in his teens. And in maturer life, this
feature of his character found distinct expression in a poem, named Prahasi, written
thirty-one years ago, in which he says that his home is in all lands, his country in all
countries, his close kindred in all homes, and that he is resolved to win this country,
this home and these kindred.

In his patriotism there is no narrowness, no chauvinism, no hatred or contempt
of the foreigner. He believes that India has a message and a mission, a special work

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

entrusted to her by Providence. But he has never denied that other countries, too,
may have their own special messages and missions. He does not dismiss the West
with a supercilious sneer, but respects it for its science, its strength and will to face
martyrdom in the cause of truth, freedom and justice and its activities for human
welfare, and wishes the East to take what it should and can from the West, not
like a beggar without patrimony or as an adopted child, but as a strong and healthy
man may take wholesome food from all quarters and assimilate it. This taking on
the part of the East from the West, moreover, is the reception of stimulus and
impetus, more than or rather than learning, borrowing or imitation. The West,
too, can derive advantage from contact with the East, different from the material
gain of the plunderer and the exploiter. The study of his writings and utterances
leaves us with the impression that the West can cease to dominate in the East only
when the latter, fully awake, self-knowing, self'possessed and self-respecting, no
longer requires any blister or whip and leaves no department of life and thought
largely unoccupied by its own citizens.

His hands reach out to the West and the East, to all humanity, not as those
of a suppliant, but for friendly grasp and salute. He is among the foremost
reconcilers and uniters of races and continents. He has renewed India’s cultural
connection with Japan, China, Siam and Islands-India by his visits to those lands.

In spite of the cruel wrongs inflicted on India by the British nation, and v/hilst
condemning such wrong-doing unsparingly, he has never refrained from being just
and even generous in his estimate of the British people.

His politics are concerned more with the moulding of society and character-
building than with the more vocal manifestations of that crowded department of
national activity. Freedom he prizes as highly and ardently as the most radical
politician, but his conception of freedom is full and fundamental. To him the chains
of inertness, cowardice and ignorance, of selfishness and pleasure-seeking, of supersti¬
tion and lifeless custom, of the authority of priestcraft and letter of scripture, consti¬
tute our bondage no less than the yoke of the stranger, which is largely a consequence
and a symptom. He prizes and insists upon the absence of external restraints. But
this does not constitute the whole of his idea of freedom. There should be inner
freedom also, born of self-sacrifice, enlightenment, self-purification and self-control.
This point of view has largely moulded his conception of the Indian political problem
and the best method of tackling it. He wishes to set the spirit free, to give it wings
to soar, so that it may have largeness of vision and a boundless sphere of activity. He
desires that fear should be cast out. Hence his politics and his spiritual ministrations
merge in each other.

Age and bodily infirmities have not made him a reactionary and obscurantist.
His spirit is ever open to new light. He continues to be a progressive social
reformer. His intellectual powers are still at their height. His latest poetic crea¬
tions of the month—perhaps one may safely say, of the week or the day—do not

vii

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

betray any dimness of vision, any lack of inspiration or fertility, nor are there in
them any signs of repetition. He continues to be among our most active writers.
This is for the joy of creation and self-expression and fraternal giving, as he loves
his kind, and human intercourse is dear to his soul. His ceaseless and extensive
reading in very many diverse subjects, including some out-of-the way sciences and
crafts, and his travels in many continents enable him to establish ever new intellec¬
tual and spiritual contacts, to be abreast of contemporary thought, to keep pace with
its advance and with the efforts of man to plant the flag of the conscious master in
the realms of the unknown—himself being one of the most sanguine and dauntless
of intellectual and spiritual prospectors and explorers.

When Curzon partitioned Bengal against the protests of her people, he threw
himself heart and soul into the movement for the self-realization and self-expression
of the people in all possible ways. But when popular resentment and despair led
to the outbreak of terrorism, he was the first to utter the clearest note of warning,
to assert that Indian nationalism should not stultify and frustrate itself by recourse
to violence, though with him abstention from the use of force under all circum¬
stances is not a religious principle. He has been equally unsparing in his condem¬
nation of the predatory instincts and activities of nations, whether of the military
or of the economic variety. He has never believed that war can ever be ended by
the pacts of robber nations so long as they do not repent and give up their wicked
ways and the spoils thereof. The remedy lies in the giving up of greed and the
promotion of neighbourly feelings between nation and nation as between individual
men. Hence the poet-seer has repeatedly given in various discourses and contexts
his exposition of the ancient text of the Ishopanishad:

^ JIT ’J'SI:

“All this whatsoever that moves in Nature is indwelt by the Lord. Enjoy thou what
hath been allotted by Him. Do not covet anybody’s wealth.’’

In pursuance of this line of thought, while the poet has expressed himself in
unambiguous language against the use of violence by the party in power in Russia,
and while he still holds that private property has its legitimate uses for the main¬
tenance and promotion of individual freedom and individual self-creation and self-
expression and for social welfare, he sees and states clearly the advantages of
Russian collectivism, as will be evident from his following cabled reply to a query of
Professor Petrov, of V. O. K, S., Moscow:

“Your success Is due to turning the tide of wealth from the individual to
collective humanity.”

As an educationist, he has preserved in his ideal of Visva-bharati, the inter¬
national university, the spirit of the ancient ideal of the tapovunus or forest retreats

Vlll

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

of the Teachers of India—its simplicity, its avoidance of softness and luxury, its
insistence on purity and chastity, its spirituality, its practical touch with nature, and
the free play that it gave to all normal activities of body and soul. While the
ancient spirit has been thus sought to be kept up, there is in this open-air institution
at Santiniketan no cringing to mere forms, however hoary with antiquity. The
Poet’s mental outlook is universal. He claims for his people all knowledge and
culture, whatever its origin, as their province. Hence, while he wants the youth
of India of both sexes to be rooted in India’s past and to draw sustenance therefrom,
while he has been practically promoting the culture of the principal religious com¬
munities of India as far as the resources of the institution permits, he has also
extended a friendly invitation and welcome to the exponents of foreign cultures as
well. This has made it possible, for any who may so desire, to pursue the study
of comparative religion at Santiniketan. He wants that there should be no
racialism, no sectarian and caste and colour prejudice in his institution.

Visva-bharati stands neither for merely literary, nor for merely vocational
education, but for both and more. Tagore wants both man the knower and man
the maker. He wants an intellectual as well as an artistic and aesthetic educa¬
tion. He wants the growth of a personality equal to meeting the demands of society
and solitude alike. Santiniketan now comprises a primary and a high school, a
college, a school of graduate research, a school of painting and modelling and of
some crafts, a music school, a school of agriculture and village welfare work, a
co-operative bank with branches and a public health institute. Here students of
both sexes have their games and physical exercises, including jiujitsu as taught by a
leading Japanese expert and other arts of defence. The poet’s idea of a village is
that it should combine all its beautiful and healthy rural characteristics with the
amenities of town life necessary for fullness of life and efficiency. Some such
amenities have already been provided in his schools. There is co-education in all
stages. It is one of the cherished desires of the poet to give girl students complete
education in a Woman’s University based on scientific methods, some of which are
the fruits of his own insight and mature experience.

When he is spoken of as the founder of Visva-bharati, it is not to be under¬
stood that he has merely given it a local habitation and a name and buildings and
funds and ideals. That he has, no doubt, done. To provide funds, he had, in the
earlier years of the school, sometimes to sell the copyright of some of his books and
even temporarily to part with some of Mrs. Tagore’s jewellery. In the earlier years
of the institution, he took classes in many subjects, lived with the boys in their rooms,
entertained them in the evenings by story-telling, recitations of his poems, games of
his own invention, methods of sense-training of his own devising, etc. Even recently
he has been known to take some classes. And he continues to keep himself in touch
with the institution in various ways.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Rabindranath has been a journalist from his teens. He has often written with
terrible truthfulness—I can bear witness to the fact from personal knowledge. In
years past the Poet successfully edited several monthlies and contributed, and still con^
tributes, to numerous more. He has written for many weeklies, too. He is the
only man in Bengal I know who was and still is capable of filling a magazine
from the first page to the last with excellent reading in prose and verse of every
description required.

I have been privileged to publish perhaps a larger number of poems, stories,
novels, articles, etc., from Rabindranath’s pen, in Bengali and English, than any
other editor. It has been a privilege without any penalty attached to it, as he is
regular, punctual and methodical, and as it is easy and pleasant to read his beautiful
handwriting. As an editor, he was the making of many authors, who subsequently
became well known, by the thorough revision to which he subjected their work.

His beautiful handwriting has been copied by so many persons in Bengal that
even I who have had occasion to see it so often cannot always distinguish the genuine
thing from the imitation.

There is an impression abroad that no English translation by Rabindranath of
any of his Bengali poems was published anywhere before the Gitanjali poems.
That is a mistake. As far as I can now trace, the first English translations by himself
of his poems appeared in the February, April and September numbers of The Modern
Review in 1912. So far as my knowledge goes, this is how he came to write in
English for publication. Sometime in 1911 I suggested that his Bengali poems should
appear in English garb. So he gave me translations of two of his poems by the
late Mr. Lokendranath Palit. Of these Fruitless Cry appeared in May and The
Death of the Star in September, 1911, in The Modern Review. When I asked him
by letter to do some translations himself, he expressed diffidence and unwillingness
and tried to put me off by playfully reproducing two lines from one of his poems of
which the purport was, ‘On what pretext shall I now call back her to whom I bade
adieu in tears?’, the humorous reference being to the fact that he did not, as a school¬
boy, take kindly to school education and its concomitant exercises. But his genius
and the English muse would not let him oflE so easily. So a short while afterwards,
he showed me some of his translations, asking me playfully whether as a quondam
school-master I would pass them. These appeared in my Review. These are, to
my knowledge, his earliest published English compositions. Their manuscripts are
with me now.

I have referred to his beautiful hand. All calligraphists cannot and do not
become painters ; though, as Rabindranath burst into fame as a painter when almost
seventy, the passage from calligraphy to painting might seem natural. I do not
intend, nor am I competent, to discourse on his paintings. They are neither what
is known as Indian art, nor are they any mere imitation of any ancient or modern
European paintings. One thing which may perhaps stand in the way of the

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

commonalty understanding and appreciating them is that they tell no story. They
express in line and colour what even the rich vocabulary and consummate literary
art and craftsmanship of Rabindranath could not or did not say. He never went
to any school of art or took lessons from any artist at home. Nor did he want to
imitate anybody. So, he is literally an original artist. If there be any resemblance
in his style to that of any other schools of painters, it is entirely accidental and
unintentional. Over seventy now, he has often expressed a desire to practise the
plastic arts. He may have begun already. In this connection I call to mind one
interesting fact. In the Bengali Santiniketan Patra {“Santiniketan Magazine”) of
Jyaistha, 1333 B.E., published more than five years ago. Dr. Abanindranath
Tagore, the famous artist, describes (pp. loo^ioi ) how his uncle Rabindranath was
instrumental in leading him to evolve his own style of indigenous art. Summing
up, Abanindranath writes:

Fell ”

“Bengal’s poet suggested the lines of art, Bengal’s artist {i.e., Abanindranath himself)
continued to work alone along those lines for many a day—”

It has been my happy privilege to live at Santiniketan as the poet-seer’s
neighbour for long periods at a stretch. During one such period, my working
room and sleeping room combined commanded an uninterrupted view of the small
two'Storied cottage in which he then lived—only a field intervened between.
During that period I could never catch the poet going to sleep earlier than myself.
And when early in the morning I used to go out for a stroll, if by chance it was very
early I found him engaged in his daily devotions in the open upper storey verandah
facing the East, but usually I found that his devotions were already over and he was
busy with some of his usual work. At midday, far from enjoying a nap, he did not
even recline. During the whole day and night, he spent only a few hours in sleep
and bath and meals, and devoted all the remaining hours to work. During that
period, I never found that he used a hand-fan or allowed anybody to fan him in
summer. And the sultry summer days of Santiniketan are unforgettable.

The infirmities of age may have now necessitated slight changes in his habits.
But even now he works harder than most young workers.

I have all along looked upon him as an earnest Sadhak. He is not, however,
an ascetic, as his ideal of life is different.

“Liberation by detachment from the world is not mine,”
he has said in one of his poems.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

One object of the sadhana of all believers in God, is to be somewhat godlike.
As God’s universe, which is both His garment and self-expression, is not a dreary
desert, the life and externals of godlike men need not always be imitations of a desert.
As bare deserts are, however, a phase of God’s creation, asceticism may be a stage,
a phase, of God-seeking and self-realization, but not the whole of it. Genuine
asceticism for finding one’s own soul and the Oversoul and for the good of man is
worthy of reverence. Equally worthy of reverence, if not more, is the treading of
the fuller and more difficult path of sadhana of those who are in the world without
being of it.

CALCUTTA

RAMANANDA CHATTERJEE

CONTRIBUTORS

SPONSORS

Mohandas Kahamchand Gandhi.

Romain Rolland.

Albert Einstein.

Kostes Palamas.

Jagadis Chandra Bose.

EDITOR

Ramananda Chatterjee, Editor, the Modem Review and Prabasi, Calcutta.

Jane Addams, Chicago (Nobel Peace Prize).

H. G. Alexander, Society of Friends, Selly Oak, Birmingham.

C. F. Andrews, Santiniketan, India.

M. Anesaki, Imperial University, Tokyo.

A. A. Bake, Santiniketan, India.

Pramathanath Banerjea, Professor, President of Council of Post-Graduate
Studies in Arts, Calcutta University.

James Barrie, Dramatist, London.

Count R. Bassewitz, Consul-General for Germany, Calcutta.

Royal Academy of French Language and Literature, Belgium.

Antonio Oliver Belmas, Poet, Cartagena, Spain.

S. K. Belvalkar, Professor, Deccan College, Poona, India.

Edwyn Bevan, Author, London.

Bhagavan-Das, Kasi Vidyapitha, Benares.

D. R. Bhandarkar, Professor, the University, Calcutta.

Vidhusekhar Bhattacharyya, Principal, Vidya-Bhavana, Visva-Bharati.
Laurence Binyon, British Museum, London.

Johan Bojer, Hvalstad, Norway (Nobel Prize for Literature).

Sudhindra Bose, Professor, State University, Iowa, U.S.A.

Bernard Bouvier, Author, Geneva.

Fru Andrea Butenschon, Oslo,' Norway.

R. J. Campbell, Dean of Chichester, Chichester, England.

Amiya C. Chakravarty, Santiniketan, India.

Ramaprasad Chanda, late of the Archaeological Survey of India, Calcutta.

L. Charles-Baudouin, Poet and Author, Geneva, Switzerland.

Sir Atul Chandra Chatterjee, India Office, London.

Bijay C. Chatterjee, Bar-at-Law, Calcutta.

Sunitt Kumar Chatterji, Professor, the University, Calcutta.

Pramatha Chaudhuri, Author, Calcutta.

Carmen Conde, Authoress, Cartagena, Spain.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

J. H. Cousins, Poet and Author, Theosophical Society, Adyar, Madras.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Sir Jahangir C. Coyajee, formerly Principal, Presidency College, Calcutta.
Benedetto Croce, Naples, Italy.

Rajani Kanta Das, International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland.

Sonya Ruth Das, Geneva.

SuRENDRA Nath Das Gupta, Principal, Sanskrit College, Calcutta.

Taraknath Das, Author and Journalist, Munich, Germany.

Sri Devamitra Dharmapala, the Mahabodhi Society, Calcutta.

G. Lowes Dickinson, Author, the University, Cambridge, England.
Theodore Dreiser, Poet and Novelist, New York, U.S.A.

W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, African Writer and Journalist.

Will Durant, Author, New York, U.S.A.

Mary Eeghen-Boisrevain, Naarden, Holland.

Havelock Ellis, London.

Marc Elmer, Journalist, Paris.

Gertrude Emerson, Joint-Editor, Asia, New York, U.S.A.

Ernestine Fitzmaurice, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.A.

Carlo Formichi, Vice-President, Royal Academy of Italy, Rome.

A. Foucher, Professor of Indology, University of Paris.

Heinrich Frick, Marburg, Germany,

John Galsworthy, Author and Dramatist, London.

Patrick Geddes, Founder-Director, Indian College, Montpellier, France.

Paul Geheeb, Director, Odenwaldschule, Germany,

Aurobindo Ghosh, Pondicherry, India.

Andre Gide, Poet and Novelist, Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, Paris.

O. P. Gilbert, Poet, Brussels, Belgium.

Emil Gotschlich, Professor, the University, Heidelberg, Germany.

Sir Hari Singh Gour, Member, Legislative Assembly, Delhi.

Richard B. Gregg, Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

Beatrice Greig, Trinidad, British West Indies.

Nagendranath Gupta, Author and Journalist, Bandra, Bombay.

H. Duncan Hall, Author, Sydney, Australia.

Knut Hamsun, Norholm, Norway (Nobel Prize for Literature).

Rendel Harris, Society of Friends, Woodbrooke, Birmingham.

E. B. Havell, Artist and Author, Oxford.

Sven Hedin, Explorer and Author, Stockholm, Sweden.

H. Heras, S.J., St. Xavier’s College, Bombay.

Ferenc Herczeg, Author, Buda-Pest, Hungary.

Hermann Hesse, Poet and Novelist, Montagnola, Switzerland.

William E. Hocking, Professor Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.
John Haynes Holmes, Community Church, New York.

Liu Yen Hon, Poet, Peiping (Peking).

Laurence Housman, Poet, Somerset, England.

John S. Hoyland, Society of Friends, Woodbrooke, Birmingham.

Dr. Hujer, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague.

XIV

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Julian S. Huxley, Author, London.

Tetsujiko Indue, Professor, Tokyo.

D. J. Irani, Solicitor and Author, Bombay.

Raja Jaipbithvi, Bangalore, India.

Joseph Jankowski, Poet and Author, Warsaw, Poland.

Ganganatha Jha, Vice-Chancellor, the University, Allahabad.

K. M. Jhaveri, Author, late of the Judicial Service, Bombay.

C. Jinarajadasa, Adyar, Madras.

Andree Karpeles, Artist and Authoress, Paris.

Toshihiko Katayama, Tokyo.

Hellen Keller, New York, U.S.A.

Lim Boon Keng, President, University of Amoy, Amoy, China.

Hermann Keyserling, Darmstadt, Germany.

William H. Kilpatrick, Professor and Educationist, Columbia University,
New York, U.S.A.

P. S. Kogan, Professor, College of Music, Moscow.

Kaethe Kollwitz, Artist, Bad Tolz, Bavaria, Germany.

Sten Konow, Orientalist, Ethnographic Museum, Oslo, Norway.

Stella Kramrisch, the University, Calcutta.

Jagadisan C. Kumarappa, Economist and Journalist, Sabarmati, Ahmedabad.
J. Kunz, Professor, University of Illionois, U.S.A.

Selma Lagerlof, Stockholm (Nobel Prize for Literature).

Harold J. Laski, Economist and Author, Professor, University of London.

V. Lesny, Professor, Czech University, Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Muriel Lester, Kingsley Hall, East End, London.

Sylvan Levi, President, Soci6te Asiatique and Professer, College de France,
Paris.

Edwin Herbert Lewis, Lewis Institute, Chicago, U.S.A.

Sinclair Lewis, New York (Nobel Prize for Literature).

Alma L. Lissberger, New York, U.S.A.

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Presidency College, Calcutta.

SisiR Kumar Maitra, Professor, Hindu University, Benares.

H. H. Pangeran Ariyo Adhipati Mangkoenegoro VII, Soerakarta, Java.
Thomas Mann, Novelist, Berlin (Nobel Prize for Literature).

John Masefield, Poet-Laureate of England, Boar’s Hill, Oxford.

Maurice Maeterlinck, Brussels (Nobel Prize for Literature).

Nanalal C. Mehta, Indian Civil Service, Naini Tal, U.P., India.

Bruno & Hertha Mendel, Berlin.

Ina Metaxa, Poetess, Tokyo.

Heinrich Meyer-Benfey, Professor, Hamburg University.

Helene Meyer-Franck, Author, Wandsbek, Germany.

Sir Brajendra Lal Mitter, Law Member, India Government, Delhi.

H. E. Chang Ming, Consul-General for China, Calcutta.

Sib Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, Zoroastrian Scholar, Bombay.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Harkiet Monhoe, Editor, Poetry Magazine, Chicago, U.S.A.

Radha Kumud Mookerji, Professor, the University, Lucknow.

T. Sturge Moore, Poet, London.

H. W. B. Moreno, Calcutta.

Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji, the University, Lucknow.

Radha Kamal Mukherjee, Professor, the University, Lucknow.

Sir Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek, Oxford, President, Inter¬
national Intellectual Co-operation, League of Nations.

J. Mushakoji, Poet and Author, Tokyo.

Dr. Mrs. Muthulakshmi Ammal Reddi, formerly Deputy President, Madras
Legislative Council, Madras.

Kalidas Nag, the University, Calcutta.

Sir Venkataratnam Naidu, late Vice-Chancellor, Madras University.
Jawaharlal Nehru, formerly President, Indian National Congress, Allahabad.
Henry W. Nevinson, Journalist and Poet, London.

Yone Noguchi, Poet and Author, Tokyo.

Raden Mas Noto-Soeroto, Javanese Poet and Author, The Hague, Holland.
Baron Okura, Tokyo.

Bhikkhu Ottama, Religious and Nationalist Leader, Burma.

Rudolf Otto, Professor, University of Marburg, Germany.

Kihachi Ozaki, Poet, Tokyo.

Alfons Pacquet, Frankfort-on-Main, Germany.

Bipin Chandra Pal, Journalist and Author, Calcutta.

Rafael Palma, President, University of the Philippines, Manila.

K. M. Panikkar, Secretary, Chamber of Princes, Bhopal.

Manilal C. Patel, Ahmedabad.

H. M. THE Shah of Persia, through H. E. Foroughi, Minister of Foreign Affairs.
R. Menendez Pidal, President, Spanish Academy, Madrid.

Albert E. Pinkevitch, Professor, the University, Moscow.

H. A. PoPLEY, General Secretary, Y.M.C.A. for India, Calcutta.

James Bissett Pratt, Professor, Williamstown, Mass., U.S.A.

Sir Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, Vice-Chancellor, Andhra University, Waltair.
Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, Bangkok, Siam.

Sir Chandsekhara Venkata Raman, Professor, Calcutta University (Nobel
Prize for Physics).

Sir Praphulla Chandra Ray, Professor, University College of Science, Calcutta.
C. R. Reddy, late Vice-Chancellor, Andhra University, India.

Ernest Renauld, Journalist, Paris.

J. N. Reuter, Professor of Sanskrit, the University, Helsingfors, Finland.
Ernest Rhys, Author and Editor, Everyman's Library, London.

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Poet and Author, Boston, U.S.A.

Nicholas Roerich, Artist and Author, Roerich Museum, New York.
Madeleine Rolland, Villeneuve, Switzerland.

XVI

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Sir William Rothenstein, Principal, Royal College of Arts, London.

Mrs. Kamini Roy, Poetess and Author, Calcutta.

Sarat C. Roy, Anthropologist, Ranchi, Chota Nagpur, India.

Arnold Rubin, Poet and Author, London.

Bertrand Russell, Author, Harting, Petersfield, England.

George Russell, Poet and Author, Dublin.

R. S. Pant Sachiv, Chief of Bhor State, India.

Mufti Mohammad Sadiq, Qadian, Panjab, India.

Sir Michael E. Sadler, the University, Oxford.

Rahimzadeh Safavi, Ministry of Justice, Tehran, Persia.

Meghnad Saha, f.r.s.. Professor, the University, Allahabad.

Har Bilas Sarda, Author, Member of the Legislative Assembly, Delhi.

Binay Kumar Sarkar, Author and Journalist, the University, Calcutta.

C. P. Scott, Editor, the Manchester Guardian, Manchester, England.

Vida D. Scudder, Authoress, Wellesley, Mass., U.S.A.

Sir Brajendranath Seal, formerly Vice-Chancellor, Mysore University.

P. Seshadri, Secretary, Inter-University Board, India.

H. M. THE King of Siam, through Prince Dhani, Minister of Education, Siam.
A. T. SiLCOCK, Society of Friends, London.

F. E. SiLLANPAA, Helsingfors, Finland.

Upton Sinclair, Author and Novelist, Pasadena, California, U.S.A.

JoGENDRA Singh, Author, Member of the Legislative Assembly, Delhi.

St. Nihal Singh, Journalist and Author, Lahore.

Sir Nil Ratan Sircar, President of the Council of Post-Graduate Studies in
Science, Calcutta University.

J. C. Smuts, Member, House of Assembly, Cape Town, South Africa.

Arnold Sommerfield, Professor, University of Munich, Munich.

Joseph Southall, Art-Critic, Birmingham, England.

Harold E. B. Speight, Author, and Professor, Dartmouth College, U.S.A.

J. A. Spender, late Editor, Westminster Gazette, Marden, Kent, England.
Hasan Suhrawardy, Vice-Chancellor, Calcutta University.

Jabez T. Sunderland, Unitarian Minister and Author, New York, U.S.A.

Edward Thompson, Author, Lecturer in Bengali, the University, Oxford.
Sybil Thorndike, London.

R. C. Trevelyan, Poet and Author, Dorking, England.

Hsu Tse-Mou, Poet and Author, Nanking, China.

Evelyn Underhill, Authoress, London.

Louis Untermeyer, Poet, New York.

Mrs. Margaret M. Urquhart, Calcutta.

W. S. Urquhart, Principal, Scottish Church College, Calcutta (formerly Vice-
Chancellor, Calcutta University).

Paul Valery, Member of the French Academy, Paris.
Sergey Vassilenko, Composer, Moscow.

xvii

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Sir R. Venkataratnam Nayudu, late Vice-Chancellor, University of Madras.

C. ViJiARAGHAVACHARiAR, formerly President, Indian National Congress, Salem,
Madras.

J. Ph. Vogel, Orientalist, Rector, University of Leyden, Holland.

Margaret Widdemer, Poet and Authoress, New York.

M. WiNTERNiTZ, Professor, German University, Prague.

Theodor Von Winterstein, President, Deutsche Akademie, Munich.

W. B. Yeats, Poet and Author, Dublin (Nobel Prize for Literature).

F. Yeats Brown, Author, late of the Indian Army, Rye, Sussex, England.

Stefan Zweig, Poet and Author, Salzburg, Austria.

[The contributions have not been printed in the sequence given above—only a rough
alphabetical order has been followed in the two sections—Greetings and Appreciations
and Offerings. The Editor begs to apologise for this. Some of the contributions arrived
late, after a considerable part of the book was in print.]

LIST OF PLATES

1. Portrait (Photogravure Frontispiece), after a photograph by Martin Vos,

New York, 1931.

2. The Call of the Flute (Colour), by Dr. Abanindra Nath Tagore, c.i.e.,

reproduced by the courtesy of O. C. Gangoly, Esq.

3. Village Huts (Colour), by Nanda Lai Bose, Director, Kala-bhavan, Visva-

Bharati, reproduced by the courtesy of The Studio Ltd., London.

4. “Natir Puja” (Worship of the Dancer) (Colour), by Nanda Lai Bose,

reproduced by the courtesy of Praphulla Nath Tagore, Esq., Sheriff of
Calcutta.

5. “Asa-Jaoar Pathe” (At the Cross-road) (Colour), by Asit Kumar Haidar,

Principal, Government School of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow.

6. The Descent from the Cross (Colour), by A. D. Thomas, reproduced

by the courtesy of The Bharat Kola Parishad, Benares.

7. The Rainy Day (Colour), by Gogonendra Nath Tagore, reproduced by

the courtesy of Mr. Bathindra Nath Tagore.

8. Tishyarakshita, Queen of Asoka (Colour), by Samarendra Nath Gupta,

Principal, Mayo School of Arts and Crafts, Lahore.

9. The Peacock (Colour), by Abdur Rahman Chughtai, reproduced by the

courtesy of Mr. Kallianjee Curumsey, Bombay.

10. “Death, O My Death, come and whisper to me” {Gitanjali ), by

Gogonendra Nath Tagore.

11. The Poet and the Dance, after a woodcut by Ramendra Nath Chakra-

varti. Government School of Arts, Calcutta.

12. The Garland, by Srimatidevi Hathisingh, Ahmedabad.

13. Lotus-Bud (Colour), by Artist Ling, Peiping (Courtesy of the Kala-bhavan,

Visva-Bharati ).

14. The Lotus offering (Colour), by Kampo Aral, Tokyo (Courtesy of the

Kala-bhavan, Visva-Bharati ).

15. The Poet as a Boy, by the courtesy of Bathindra Nath Tagore, Esq.

16. The Poet as a Student in London, by the courtesy of Bathindra Nath

Tagore, Esq.

17. The Poet in Early Manhood.

18. The Poet during the Swadeshi Movement (1906), by the courtesy of

Messrs. Bourne 8f Shepherd, Calcutta.

19. The Poet in 1912, by the courtesy of the Gainsborough Studio, London.

20. A Portrait in Pastel (Colour), 1916, by Dr. Abanindra Nath Tagore, c.i.e.

21. A Portrait in Pastel, by Dr. Abanindra Nath Tagore, c.i.e., by the

courtesy of Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, C.I.E.

XIX

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

22. The Poet at the Indian National Congress (Colour), by Gogonendra

Nath Tagore.

23. The Poet (1926), after a photograph by Suse Byk^

24. A Portrait in Pencil (1917), by Mukul Chandra Dey, a.r.c.a., Prineipal,

Government School of Arts, Calcutta.

25. Portrait Bust, by Jacob Bpstein, by the courtesy of Birmingham City

Corporation.

26. Portrait (1929), after a Mezzotint by Boris Georgiev, Berlin.

27. Portrait (1930), after an Etching by Levon West, New York.

28. In Paris (1926), after a Drawing by Matsuhara.

29. First Pioneers’ Commune composing greetings for the Poet (1930).

30. Three Indian Sculptures (illustrating R. P. Chanda’s article), by the

courtesy of the Archseological Survey of India.

I N common thousands of his countrymen I owe much to one who by his

poetic gennus and singular purity of life has raised India in the estimation of the
world. Bipt I owe also more. Did he not harbour in Santiniketan the inmates
of my Ashram uvho had proceeded from South Africa? The other ties and memories
are too sacred to bear mention in a public tribute.

SABARMATI, AHMEDABAD.

NIOBfi.

(Trois fragments d’une oeuvre de jeunesse)

Premier Fragment.

Campagne de Thebes. Aux portes de la ville. Soir d’automtte. Peu avant
le coucher du soleil. Des chants au loin. Paraissent les Ni(^bides,—^Jeunes gargons
et jeunes filles,—se tenant par la main.

NIOBIDES

O campagne de Thebes, terre de la patrie, air ei^aume qui me caresse, qu’il est
doux de sentir votre souffle amoureux^ Et vous, saintes montagncs,
Citheron, combien j'aime tes hauteurs roc^illeuses, quand je suis a la course
sur les pierres aigues les biches bondissantes, >ou qu’en la purete solitaire des cimes
je mire mes yeux bleus dans le ciel d’azur son]t,bre, et regarde couler les nuages dores,
tandis qu’autour de moi soupirent tendremjrat leur langoureuse plainte les rossignols
caches. ...

Puis, le soir, je descend^s, 'tancfis que I’ombre monte, de la terre qui s’endort.
Les cloches de txoujpta'ux tintent dans la vallee. Les grillons font vibrer leur
crecelle dusfinee. L’air mysterieux s’allume d’une pluie d’etincelles, yeux d’or au
' VoT tranquille, au doux battement d’ailes. J’orne mes cheveux blonds de lucioles,
‘fleurs des nuits,* et vers les hautes ombres des murailles de Thebes, qui se dresscnt
au fond sur I’horizon rose, nous revenons gaiment, nous tenant par la main, formant
de nobles danses au travers ^es prairies, et baignant nos pieds blancs aux ruisseaux
argentes.

NIOBE

O mes enfants, vos voix ont la fraicheur des sources; vos bouches et vos bras
ont le parfum des bois. Deioneus, Jole, Hyacinthe, mes ames, que vous avez tarde,
ce soir I Des que vous paraissez, je sens que j’etais sans vie, lorsquc j’etais sans
vous. ... Et toi, Deidamie, reveuse au pas languissant, pourquoi viens-tu, ma

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

fille, seule, en arriere dcs autres? Tes chevcux fins et pales voilent ton front de
lait; qu’as'tu fait aujourd’hui, loin de moi? .Viens» dis'inoi..

DEIDAMIE

Sous le tremble au mouvant feuillage, le long du pur ruisseau,—^au bruissement
de I’eau qui coule entre les pierres, sans voix et les yeux clos,—sans mouvementt
comme en dormant,—^j’entendais les soupirs du vent dans les roseaux; et du zephyr
la vive haleine—rafraichissait mon front, mais sans calmer ma peine.

NIOBE

Qu’as'tu?

DEIDAMIE

Je ne sais pas. Ja crois que mon coeur bat trop vite. Je crois, . . . passent
en moi tous les frissons du vent; et ma poitrine est trop petite pour sentir tout ce
que je sens.

NIOBE

Sur mes genoux, appuie ton front. Ton mal n’est pas un mal, O ma Deidamie,
c’est I’approche d’un bien delicieux! .... (Enivrante douceur de sentir r&losion

de ces fleurs de mon sang, chastes et voluptueuses 1 ).Et toi, Callirhoe, petit

faon bondissant, tu n’es pas triste toi? Tu n’as pas de tournments, O la plus jeune
des Niobides? .... Comme tu as couru! Sur tes mollets bruns, les ronces ont
marque leur griffe. Ta nuque s’est halee. Et de la chair des fraises tes levres sont

rougies. Que t’importe? Sais-tu seulment que tu es jolie? Tu ris.Ah!

Quand I’amour voudra s’en emparer, comme elle s’enfuira, ma petite hirondellel . . .

Mon coeur set penetre d’une tendresse fiere. Mes enfantsi

Olympiens, regardez^nous! Apollon, ocean de lumi&e, Artemis, lac paisible
oil se mire le jour,—qui de vous, immortels, est plus beau que mes fils? Qui de
vous, O deesses, est plus heureuse que moi?

Le PEOPLE

Niobe, ne crains-tu pas la jalousie des dieux?

NIOBE

Mieux vaut exciter I’envie que la pitiel

Le PEOPLE

O ma fille, souvent Tune est bien pr« de I’autre.

{La nuit tombe tout d’un coup, Des nuages lourds couvrent le cied)

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Second Fragment

La scene suivante voit passer dans la unit d'une tempete; AtrSe, roi d'Argos
et frere de Niobe, que poursuit la vengeance des Olympiens, Le reseau noir du
del s’est detendu lentement. La lumiere renait. Jour crepusculaire, triste et
doux. Le soleil descend derriere les montagnes.

Le PEOPLE

La nuit s’eclaire doucement. Ses longs voiles retombent avec une paisible
majeste. O jour, je reverrai ton beau corps resplendir! Ami, mes yeux te baisent
tres amoureusement.

NIOBE

O Dieux, que tout s'efEace,—et tout cc que j’ai diti . . . .—Oui, la tendre

lumiere. Un souffle frais baigne mon front brulant. Zeus sourit. Zeus

pardonne. . . . (Chant de flutes lointaines) Quel est ce chant plaintif?

Le PEOPLE

C’est le cortege de la Grande Deesse. Demeter a perdu sa fille, la blonde
Proserpine. Elle erre par les champs, et I’appelle a grands cris. La nature est en
deuil; elle dort sous la terre, la blonde Proserpine, et durant de longs mois, Demeter
gemira.

NIOBE

Infortuneel .... Mon coeur est emu de pitie! Ah! combien je le sens,
le poids de tes douleurs!

Les NIOBIDES

Le doux automne est termine. La lumiere languissante sourit avec melancolie.
Les bois d’or rougissant eteignent leur splendeur. Du long sommeil d’hiver la nature

s’endort. O fleurs, fermez les yeux! La terre avide vous devore. En

son sein, dans la nuit, vous allez disparaitre, et pour les pieds charmants de la jeune
deesse, vous irez tapisser les prairies de I'Hades, tandis que notre coeur soupirera pour

vous. Petites ames parfumees, vous irez consoler le front pale des ombres

qui n’ont pas oublie. . . , Leurs levres epuisees, qui boiront votre haleine, cher-
cheront sur vos levres la trace des baisers du jour evanoui. ......

Mais nous vous reverrons, cheres petites fleurs! Et vous aussi, oiseaux qui
chantez le printemps! Nous feterons ensemble le retour du soleil, les jeunes pousses
qui percent la prison de I’&orce, le frisson amoureux de la vie qui s’eveille, le soufiBe

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

de la terre et le ruissellemcnt des vagues de lumiere. Que ne suis-je deja en

ces jours bienheureux! Jolie fille dc Tauguste Ceres, ne sois pas epouse trop fidHe!
Reviens-nous, jeune amie, nous languissons pour toil Viens, nous aimons les rires,
les danses, et I’amour. Sommes^nous pas compagnons plus plaisants que le sombre
Pluton? Reviens, amie, reviens te meler a nos choeurs!

On a toujours le temps de dormir sous la terre I ....

NIOBE

Mon coeur est penetre d’une douceur profonde. La musique de vos voix, O mes
enfants, efface le reve qui m’oppressait. Je respire. ... La lumiere s’etend. L'or
de VOS cheveux blonds s’allume a ses reflets. Je vois aupres de moi vos innocents
visages. Parmi la rose des nuages, le ciel bleu refleurit, Et, dechirant les derniers
voiles avec ses fleches reparait Apollon.

Tandis que Niobe parle, la lumiere grandit en effet, prend un eclat intense.
Et, quand Niobe prononce le nom d’Apollon, Vhorizon s*embrase de Vapotheose du
soleil couchant. Sur ce ciel rouge parait Apollon marmoreen, eblouissant, impassible,
bras tendu, I’arc a la main.

Le PEOPLE

(saist d^effroi).

Apollon 1

(Niobe se retourne, pousse un cri etouffe, ne peut ni parler ni bouger.)

Les NIOBIDES

(S’enfuient en desordre, comme une voice d'oiseaux.)

Ah! . *

Troisieme Fragment.

Le soleil a disparu derriere la montague. II a laisse au ciel de larges trainees
lie poussiere d'or, et des reflets oranges, qui s’eteignent graduellement, pendant la
scene qui suit.

NIOBE

Bien-aimes! Bien^aimesl

•La scene qui suit le second fragment decrit la chasse des Niobides par I’Archer Divin.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OE TAGORE

Du sahest den wilden Kampf der Geschopfe, der aus Not und dunklem
Begehren hervorquillt. Du sahest Rettung in stiller Betrachtung und in den Werken
der Schdnheit, Diese pflegend hast Du den Menschen gedient durch ein langes
fruchtbares Leben, uberall milden and frcicn Sinn vcrbreitend, wie es die Weisen
Deines Volkes als Ideal verkiindet haben.

BERLIN

[translation]

ABOUT FREE WILL

I F the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way round the earth, were gifted
with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced, that it would travel
its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once for all.

So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence,
watching man and his doings, smile about the illusion of his, that he was acting
according to his own free will.

This is my conviction, although I know well that it is not fully demonstrable.
If one thinks out to the very last consequence what one exactly knows and under¬
stands, there would hardly be any human being who would be impervious to this
view, provided his self-love did not ruffle up against »it. Man defends himself from
being regarded as an impotent object in the course of the Universe. But should the
lawfulness of happenings, such as unveils itself more or less clearly in inorganic nature,
cease to function in front of the activities in our brain?

Leaving aside the inconsistency of such a view, the influence of alcohol and
other sharply controllable factors on our thoughts, feelings, and activities, should
show very distinctly that determinism does not stop before the majesty of our human
will.

May be, that we and the human society require the illusion of the freedom of
human activities!

The conviction about the law of necessity in human activities introduces into
our conception of man and life a mildness, a reverence, and an excellence, such as
would be unattainable without this conviction.

■ ■ ■■

Thou sawest the fierce strife of creatures, a strife that wells forth from need
and dark desire. Thou sawest the escape in calm meditation and in creations
of beauty. Cherishing these, thou hast served mankind all through a long and
fruitful life, spreading everywhere a gentle and a free thought in a manner such
as the Seers of thy people have proclaimed as the ideal.

THE golden book OF TAGORE

NIOBE

Quoil je ne hairais pas les monstres qui me dechirent?

LC PEOPLE

Helas! ils sent des dieux ; ils peuvent tout sur nous.

NIOBE

C’est parce qu’ils peuvent Tout, que je veux les hair. Centre leur force atroce,
je n’ai que mon mepris; mais mon mepris est, seul, au dessus de leurs coups.

Le PEOPLE

Prends garde que leur vengeance ne soit pas epuisee!

NIOBE

Que me fait leur vengeance? II n’est plus rien que j'aimel

Le PEOPLE

La douleur est pareille a I'Ocean immense. Qui connalt tous ses flots? La
douleur est pareille a I’insondable ciel. Qui en a vu le fond?

NIOBE

La douleur a pour bornes cclles de notre vie. Je puis mourir. Je ne crains done
plus rien.

Le PEOPLE

Malheureuse, ne parle point de la pire infortune 1

NIOBE

J’ai touche le fond de I’ablme. Mon ame est descendue dans la nuit infinie.
Jamais elle ne reverra la lumiere perdue. Le vide m’enveloppe. Je tombe. Rien
n’est plus..

La nuit vient doucement, la belle nuit lumineuse. Le ciel vert pale est tendre
comme une fleur. Au loin, reprend le chant des flutes.

Le PEOPLE

Dans I’ombre des forets, I'errante Demeter promene eternellement son chant
inconsole.

The golden book of Tagore

NIOBE

Hdasl

Lc PEOPLE
(Regardant Niobe.)

La bienfaisante musique a fait jaillir les larmes de son coeur oppresse,

NIOBE

O douce et triste plainte, qui te meles a la mienne! . . . Demeter, aie pitiel
Tu connais ma douleur, je souffre comme toil

Le PEOPLE

Tu vois, ma fille, les dieux sont soumis a Tuniverselle peine.

NIOBE

Crois'tu que mon coeur soit assez vil pour trouver une consolation dans le
malheur des autres? Laisse-moil Va^t^enl ...... (Plus doucement) Ami, je

te remercie. Ton ame est simple et bonne. Mais laisse-moi. Seule, je veux
pleurer.

Le peuple se retire en silence, Le chant des flutes continue tres document au

loin.

NIOBE

Assise, appuyee a un tertre de ga^on au milieu de la scene.

Demeter, que de maux nous souffrons toutes deux! ...... Immortelle, tu

portes une douleur immortelle, et sans cesse ta peine fleurit, renouvelee. Malheureuse I
tu ne peux pas mourirl .... Mais toi, tu reverras ta fille! Et moi, jamais ils

ne reviendront, les bien aimes. O Demeter, tu ne sais pas I’horreur de

"Jamais." Ton coeur est resigne et ta calme tristesse s’exhale en graves plaintes,
penetrees de pitie!. . , . Mais tu ne sais pas ce quec’estque; "Jamais”. . , . . .
Delivre-moi! Je ne te demande pas la vie de mes enfants. Helas! Tu pleures

le tien!. Mais la mort,—Deesse, accorde moi la mort! Seule grace qui me

reste, et que le dernier des miserables a le droit d’esperer! ........ Tes pleurs

tombent sur moi dans la rosse nocturne. Je sens flutter dans Tair ta compassion

tendre. Quelle soudaine paix! Void la vie cruelle qui m’abandonne

enfin!. Lumide, tu es si belle!. Et pourtant, au malheureux

qui souffre, qu’il est doux de te perdre!

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

HERMES

{Paratt derriere Niobe.)

Niobe, Hermes je suis, messager dt la mort. Ma main est secourable. Elle
guide les ames desolees a Timmortel oubli. Viens, appuie-toi sur ellel N’accuse
point les dieux. Les dieux ont pitie de tcs pleurs.

NIOBE

(Soupire douloureusement.)

Helas! ne pouvaient^ils les laisser vivre encore? .... O mes fils bien aimesl

HERMES

(A mesure qu'il parle, on voit sur les traits de Niobe succeder a la douleur la
resignation, le calme, une paix melancolique, enfin un sourire las — mourante, la tete
renversee en arriere et regardant le del.)*

Zeus les a delivres. II a sauve leurs ames du Dcstin de ta race. L'heritage
d’orgueil et de folle puissance, leurs bras furent brises avant de s’en souiller. N’accuse
point les dieux, fille de Tantalel Pense a I’impie foudroyel Pense a ton £rke
Atree, I’insense qu’emporte I’ouragan, loup hurlant, et legaunt a sa race ses tourments
et ses crimes! . 4 . . Dans le divin sourire de la nature, tes fils sont endormis.
L’inalterable paix de I’Infini les remplit. Leur souffle s’est fondu dans le torrent
serein de la lumiere. Leur ame s’est unie a notre ame immortelle. Qui, une fois,
a goute a la source eternelle ne saurait approcher encore sa levre de I’eau trouble ou se
nielent vos larmes. Femme, ne pleure plus! Les divins Olympiens sourient tres

doucement, quand ils vous voient repandre tant de larmes pour vivre. Apaise

ton coeur blesse! Ta douleur est finie. Je verse sur ton front le long sommcil sans
rcves. Sous son baume indulgent la peine se dissipe; ce qu’on souffrit n’est plus.
Endors'toi, Niobe, dans les bras affectueux de la Bonne Nourrice. L’auguste
Demeter te berce tendrement. Voici le soir parfume. Comme un fleuve de pourpre
la lumiere s’epanche. L’ame qu’un dur labeur, tout le jour, a lasse, voit venir avec
)o;e la grande nuit paisible. L’haleine fraternelle de la terre profonde monte et baise
ta tete pesante qui s’inclinc. Le soleil tout-puissant eteint son regard d’or. La sage
melancolie de la musique meurt dans Pair immobile. Tout se tait. Tout s’arrete.
Tout reve. Tout est reve.. .

*Niobd est vue de face. A I’apparition d'Hertnis, elle ne s’est point tournee, elle n’a fait aucun
ntouvement pour le voir; elle regarde devant elle et le voit, pour ainsi dire, en elle.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

La musique ires douce accompagne sa voix,—et s'efface, a la fin^ Oest la
lumiere sans rayonnement d’aprh le jour et d*avant la nuit. La lune n*est pas encore
levee. Dans le del vert'pdle fleurissent des etoiles. A la fin, I’une d'elles se detache.
Elle trace sur la voute un lumineux sillage, et s'eteint. .....

[Cette tragddie, de Romain Rolland fut ^crite, vers sa vingtifeme annoe, a Rome, oi il etait ^
I’Ecole Franfaise du Palazzo Farnese.]

OEBER DEN FREIEN WILLEN
von Albert Einstein fiir Rabindranath Tagore

W ENN der Mond bei der Zuriicklegung seines ewigen Weges um die Erde mit
Bewusstsein begabt ware, so wiirde er wohl iiberzeugt sein, dass er seinen
Weg freiwillig, au£ Grund eines ein fiir allemal gefassten Entschlusses,
ausfiihren wiirde.

So wiirde ein mit hoherer Einsicht und mit vollkommenerm Wabrnehmungs-
vermbgen ausgestattetes Wesen den Menschen und sein Tun sehen und iiber dessen
Illusion lacheln, nach freiem Willen zu handeln.

Dies glaube ich, wohl wissend, dass es nicht vbllig beweisbar ist. Bei konse'
quentem Zuendedenken dessen, was wir genau kennen und wissen, wiirde sich wohl
kaum ein Mensch dieser Auffassung verschliessen, wenn sich die Eigenliebe nicht
dagegen straubte. Der Mensch wehrt sich dagegen, sich im Ablauf des Weltganzen
als machtloses Objekt anzusehen. Sollte die Gesetzmassigkeit des Geschehens, wie
sie sich uns bei der anorganischen Natur mehr oder minder klar entschleiert bei den
Vorgangen in unserm Gehirn haltmachen?

Abgesehen von der Inkonsequenz einer solchen Meinung spricht die Einwirkung
des Alkohols sowie anderer scharf kontrollierbarer Faktoren au£ unsere Gedanken,
Ge£uhle und Handlungen sehr deutlich da£iir, dass der Determinismus vor unserer
Majestat nicht Halt macht.

Mogen wir und mag die menschliche Gesellscha£t die Illusion der Freiheit der
menschlichen Handlungen niitig haben!

Die Oberzeugung von der Notwendigkeit des menschlichen Tuns bringt in
unsere Auffassung den Menschen und dem Leben gegeniiber eine Milde, Ergebenheit
und Oberlegenheit, welche ohne diese Oberzeugung unerreichbar ware.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Du sahest den wilden Kampf der Geschopfe, der aus Not und dunklem
Begehren hervorquillt. Du sahest Rettung in stiller Betrachtung und in den Werken
der Schdnheit. Diese pflegend hast Du den Menschen gedient durch ein langes
fruchtbares Leben, iiberall milden and freien Sinn verbreitend, wie es die Weisen
Deines Volkes als Ideal verkiindet haben.

BERLIN

[translation]

ABOUT FREE WILL

So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence,
watching man and his doings, smile about the illusion of his, that he was acting
according to his own free will.

This is my conviction, although I know well that it is not fully demonstrable.
If one thinks out to the very last consequence what one exactly knows and under¬
stands, there would hardly be any human being who would be impervious to this
view, provided his self-love did not ruffle up against <it. Man defends himself from
being regarded as an impotent object in the course of the Universe. But should the
lawfulness of happenings, such as unveils itself more or less clearly in inorganic nature,
cease to function in front of the activities in our brain?

May be, that we and the human society require the illusion of the freedom of
human activities!

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[translation]

THE POET’S CORNER

I N December 1927 at Salonica, where I was invited to celebrate my literary jubilee,
I said: ‘A world-famous poet, Rabindranath Tagore, in one of his splendid
utterances (transmitted to us by Romain Rolland in his book Mahatma Gandhi)
tells us what a great thing is the poet’s seclusion within his natural precincts, and
his ever-active asceticism. What a great thing indeed is the “poet’s corner,” to use
his own words. The poet’s song is like the song of a bird. And the bird—what
does it do when the rosy-fingered dawn puts life into it? “Its awakening,” he
tells us, “is not disturbed by the necessity of finding its food. Its wings never
fail to respond to the call of heaven. Songs of joy it sings to the new morning
light.” A great lesson, from this great Wanderer from India, the spiritual
ambassador whom Asia has accredited to Europe, as he has been happily described.
Blessed be the poet who is satisfied in his own little corner. It is the crib where
Poetry made flesh is born.’ Thus did I speak then.

And I add now: The poet, who embraces within his inner being a world
of joy, no matter wherever he stands, diffuses over the whole universe the charm
of his little corner, and his message is like a song. Rabindranath Tagore whether
he sings a lyric or delivers a message, like another apostle of the venerable Mother
to her far-away daughter, he is always the Gardener who attends to the flowers
which grow in the garden of the Queen. His words breathe forth the imperious
mysticism of prophecy and the cool softness of an idyl, nay, he knows well how to
loiter and pick up the best of flowers from the forests of Kalidasa and Valmiki and the
flower-gardens of Shakespeare and Shelley.

The dedication to Rabindranath Tagore of a Golden Book, on the occasion of
his Seventieth Birthday Anniversary, is but a very modest token of our gratitude to
him. It would only remind us of the Temple of Spirit which we owe to his divine
genius. I very humbly offer him my respects under the canopy of light poured out
upon me by the sky of Attica; and my soul, in its flight to imprint a kiss of love
and homage upon his venerable hand, reminds me of one of those stags which, as
he himself depicts in his Religion of the Forest, “runs about in the wilds to kiss the
hands of hermits.”

ATHENS KOSTES PALAMAS

I T is more than a third o£ a century that the Poet Tagore and I have been drawn
together in closest bonds of sympathy. His friendship has been unfailing
through years of my ceaseless efforts during which I gained step by step a wider
and more sympathetic view of continuity of life and its diverse manifestations. It
was in following this quest that I succeeded in making the dumb plant the most
eloquent chronicler of its inner life and experiences by making it write down its own
history. The self-made records, thus made, prove that there is no life-reaction in
even the highest animal which has not been foreshadowed in the life of the plant.
The barrier which seemed to separate kindred phenomena was found to have vanished,
the plant and the animal appearing as a multiform unity in a single ocean of being.
In this vision of truth the final mystery of things will by no means be lessened, but
greatly deepened. It is no less a miracle that man, circumscribed cn all sides by
the imperfection of his senses, should yet build himself a raft of thought to make
daring adventures in unchartered seas. And in his voyage of discovery he catches
an occasional glimpse of the ineffable wonder that was hidden from his view. That
vision crushes out of him all self-sufficiency, all that kept him unconscious of the
great pulse that beats through the universe.

The same cosmic unity has unfolded itself to Tagore’s poetic vision and has
found expression in his philosophic outloolc and in his incomparable poems. May his
vision expand every day and may his message reach every corner of the earth 1

CALCUTTA

GREETINGS

AND

APPRECIATIONS

P erhaps the most valuable contribution which can be made to our perplexing
age is a revelation of the essential unity and validity of all human experiences,
that our intellectual and emotional understanding may approach our commercial
and political arrangements. Inspite of the magnificent methods of communication
modern science has placed at our disposal, such a revelation can be made only in
the age-old way—through the spirit of a genius. His message to be natural and
inevitable must be varied as well as profound, romantic as well as classical, delight¬
ful as well as poignant; above all it must be clothed in Beauty sufficient to carry
it over the gulfs lying between different peoples, especially those who live in the
East and those who live in the West.

Rabindranath Tagore has met all these requirements of genius combined in a
man who is at once a poet, a philosopher, a humanitarian, an educator.

We therefore salute him on his birthday with gratitude, with admiration,
with fellowship and affection.

He has once more made clear to us the saying we so often used in the early
days of the University Settlement—the things that make us alike are finer and deeper
than the things that make us different.

HULL HOUSE, JANE ADDAMS

CHICAGO, U.S.A.

A GATHANJALI

Dedicated to Rabindranath

RABINDRANATH

NI SASAGURU WAKA NISHU

Himalaya no
Mine no ha somuru
Hi no hikari,

Sue wa Ganga no
No wo terasubeku.

Asahiko ni
Sasoware hiraku
Fundarike,

Iro'ka ni mi-sora no
Inochi yadoshite.

[translation]

Lo! A glitter of light, the purple gleaming at the apex of the Himalaya I
Who doubts that it shall finally pervade the plains of the Ganga?

Quickened by the first touch of the rising Sun, the Pundarika lotus opens its
petals, harbouring the life of heaven in its lustre and scent.

IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY, M. ANESAKI

TOKYO

TAGORE AT WOODBROOKE

I T was a Red-Letter Day in Woodbrooke’s history when first Rabindranath Tagore
visited us. Woodbrooke believes that its method and ideal—the free study
of the great movements of thought and life in the world to-day, rooted in a
belief in man’s divine brotherhood, in the conviction that we are all sons of God,
sharing a common life—this religious conviction and this free method of study seem
to us akin to what we have seen and heard of the educational method and ideal of
Santiniketan.

Rabindranath Tagore arrived here in May, 1930. We felt at home with him,
and we believe he was at home with us, for he came back for two further visits.

And in those days, few as they were, he revealed the richness of his nature.
Do you think of him as a venerable, white-bearded patriarch? Yes: but listen to
him reading from the Crescent Moon, and you know at once that he is the child
of his own dreams—the wilful child, tool You say he is a wise man, a seer or
mystic. Listen to his discourse on the nature of true civilisation, hear his pro¬
found utterances coming out of the depth of our silent meditations, and you know
these things are true indeed. But watch him as he walks round the Art Gallery,
looking at his pictures, and see the playful smile that lights up his face as he recalls
the mood of fantastic creation that caught him one day, moving him to draw beasts
and no-beasts, that have no other existence. Or see the pictures themselves 5 the
delicate grace of one, the grotesque weirdness of another, the frightful force of one,
the quiet of another, the minute detail, the bold line, the harmony of hue or colour,
the strength—surely these creations are not all the work of one man.

Thus did he open before our eyes, as a flower of several hues, like a sweet-pea
with no symmetry of equal petals, but none the less a flower of rare beauty, unique
in its own way. And we loved him.

SELLY OAK, HORACE G. ALEXANDER

BIRMINGHAM

THE POET

T he call to write this birthday greeting to the Poet, whom I love, came to me
when I was in Cape Town in the very midst of the Indian struggle. We
were incessandy engaged in resisting the encroachment of Colour Bar legisla^
tion, which was impending in the Transvaal. Every moment of my own time was
occupied with the work in hand. Memories at once came thronging to my mind
of all I owed to the Poet in the past, and I will recall one of them.

Nearly twenty years ago the poet himself had sent me out to South Africa,
along with Willie Pearson, in order to help Mahatma Gandhi in his great Passive
Resistance campaign, which had then reached its most critical stage. The summons
had come to go there just after the glorious news had reached India that the Nobel
Prize for World Literature had been awarded to Rabindranath Tagore. We went
out with intense happiness at the Poet's literary triumph still echoing and ringing in
our hearts.

Thus he himself sent us out on a great adventure of faith at a propitious moment
with his own blessing. He told us to convey to Mahatma Gandhi, and to his noble
band of followers, his deep love for them and his admiration for the heroic fight in
which they were involved. He called it in one of his letters to me “the battle of
India's freedom.''

After a very stormy voyage across the Indian Ocean, we had disembarked at
last, and had met Mahatma Gandhi on the wharf when the ship arrived safe in
Durban harbour. The message we carried from Rabindranath Tagore to the Indian
patriot formed a really important link in the Passive Resistance struggle in Natal.
For it heartened the Indian community and its leader when they received from us
direct this gift of love which came with the Poet's message. A bond of spiritual
kinship was thus established between the Indians in South Africa and Santiniketan.
This bond has never been broken. So strong was it that when Mahatma Gandhi
left South Africa for England he placed his own boys, eighteen in number, who
had lived with him for many years at Phoenix, under the care of Rabindranath
Tagore, who kept them, for many months in his own Asram at Santiniketan.
Maganlal Gandhi was then in charge of these “Phoenix” boys, and a very deep
affection sprang up between him and the Poet.

Let me dwell for a moment longer on these early days when Willie Pearson
and I had just left Santiniketan, and had landed in South Africa. During that period
of new spiritual vision and illumination thoughts of the Poet and his Asram would
come clearly before us in all our conversations. It was the first full flush of our
common enthusiasm and love for him and it coloured all our existence with its own
bright hues. The very sky itself seemed more glorious as we spoke about him and
shared our thoughts together.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

This was also for us both the happy moment of discovery of a new friendship
with Mahatma Gandhi. These two affections were blended into one in a very
intimate manner. Often under the stars at night we would sit in the silence and
then speak to one another in quiet accents of the wonderful evenings we had spent
with our Gurudev on the terrace outside his little upper room at Santiniketan.
Those were golden moments and Mahatma Gandhi realised with deep sympathy
our own hearts’ devotion to the Poet. He often spoke to us of his own great longing
to meet him. Thus we were all drawn together into a single circle of affection.

I turn back again from this earlier recollection to last April, when the call
came to me in Capetown, as I have related, to write this birthday greeting for the
Golden Book of Tagore, The mail for India, via Lorenzo Marques, was just on
the point of departure, and there would be no further steamer sailing from South
Africa to India for many days. It seemed necessary for me, therefore, if I would
be in time for the Poet's birthday, to sit down at once where I was in order to try
to write out in full some of the thoughts which rose up from the depth of my heart,
when I remembered all that the Poet had meant in my own life and what devotion
and reverence I owed to him for all his goodness.

What I then thought out was written down in a home for destitute coloured
children called “The House of St. Francis of Assisi.’’ This home for the poor had
been built on the Cape Flats for the sake of the orphans and waifs and strays among
the African population. While I wrote they v/ere all playing around me at their
own games, and their merry laughter carried me back in thought to Santiniketan
itself. I could easily picture the Poet, like another St. Francis of Assisi, in the
midst of his own merry children in his Asram in Bengal, where the beauty of
Nature is loved by the youngest boys and girls alike. The thought that came upper¬
most to my mind as I sat there watching the little children at play was to remember
with deep affection how the Poet had been, in every sense of the word, my “Gurudev’’
for nearly twenty years. Let me explain in this Birthday Number how all this began.

III

The night when I first met the Poet was at W. Rothenstein’s house, on the
Hill near Hampstead Heath. H. W. Nevinson had taken me there. He had met
me by accident in the street and had told me casually that Rabindranath Tagore had
arrived in London. He mentioned also that W. B. Yeats was that very night
reading aloud some of Tagore’s poems in Rothenstein’s house. It was in the summer
of 1912, and my eagerness was so great that I hurried along almost too excited to
talk to Nevinson as we walked up the Hill to meet the Poet.

The readings given by W. B. Yeats were taken from Gitanjali, and as I listened
I was spell-bound. It is quite impossible for me to describe in words what had
happened. The music of the poems took possession of me, and their beauty
enthralled me. The Poet himself was there, in the background, shrinking from

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

observation, and I can well recollect how my one great longing at that moment was
to touch his feet. From the lighted room and the Poet’s presence, and the sound
of the music of his poems, I went out at last into the late evening twilight and
walked in solitude on Hampstead Heath. The moon had just begun to rise and
the air was full of enchantment. Darkness was slowly creeping over the earth,
and a beautiful afterglow of light was still visible in the West. The glamour of it
all was upon me, and I wandered across the Heath, up and down, hardly knowing
where I was going. At that hour I was literally oblivious of time and space and
things external. There was an inner vision of beauty that 1 saw with the eye of
the spirit. It went far beyond the bounds of this temporal and material world.

The joy of this illumination has never altogether passed away. Whenever I
return into the Poet’s presence after a long absence, the memory of it unfailingly
comes back to me. He has introduced me into the secret of this new spirit of beauty
in the universe. Since that first time of vision I have tried to see this beauty with
his eyes, both as he describes it in his own songs and also as he builds up its living
fabric in his Asrant.

Any one who knew my life before I met the Poet can appreciate how the
dividing line came actually here. What followed that first meeting with the Poet
has brought with it something new and different which has changed my whole
outlook. He broke through the dull routine of outward form that had imprisoned
me up to that time, and thus set me free. How it all happened 1 cannot explain or
describe, but the effect has been obvious. Therefore, in human ways, I feel that
I owe the change which I then experienced to him, and it is always a supreme joy
to me whenever I am able to acknowledge this debt of love which I owe; to him more
than to any other human being.

If I were asked to analyse the outstanding things in the Poet’s own character
that have drawn me to him most of all, I should mention in the first place the fearless
love of freedom and passionate devotion to truth, which make him, even in his late
declining years, the most daring adventurer of our own times, both in his thoughts
and his actions. He has learnt the secret of perpetual youth. He has always retained
the heart of a child, and has also kept the eager outlook of a new-comer upon the
future. He is filled with admiration, hope and love. Suffering may come to him
in incredible forms of pain. No one has suffered more acutely and sensitively than
he has done. But as long as the ideal is set before him and a fresh adventure of
faith and hope is in sight, he will go through torture, almost intolerable, to one of
his supremely refined nature, in order to reach his goal. Even to-day in his failing
years he is ready at a moment’s notice without a single consideration of the hardships
that must be undergone.

The goal itself with him is always high, always glorious, always noble. He
has the poet’s deep love for the colour and music, the song and drama of life. But

711^7

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

all the time, there is an austerity of refinement that is fastidious in its purity, lest
the ideal itself should become debased and the aim low. He cannot bear for a
single moment that the beauty of the end in view should be tarnished by
any meanness in the process. At the same time his moral idealism is never formal
or conventional. It rests upon an unerring aesthetic instinct, which is like a strain
of music played upon a perfect instrument by a master-hand. The slightest discord
mars for him the whole song. It jars upon his inner spirit, creating an agony which
less sensitive natures could not for a moment understand.

One incident is vividly recalled to my mind, which I personally witnessed in
Japan. When he was in that country, he was asked on one occasion to write a
short poem concerning a deed of violence which had been committed by two chiefs
of rival clans. They had fought from dawn till evening on a grassy plateau, high
up in the hills near Hakone. A great rock overshadowed the place. When the
sun had set on that day of battle both the warriors had fallen dead, smitten with
many wounds, and the ground had been covered with their blood. The leaders
of the Japanese people, who had come to the spot with the Poet, asked him to write
an epigram in a few words commemorating this heroic occasion.

I could see, at that moment, the strained anguish of the Poet’s face as he quickly
grasped the incident just as it had occurred and shrank back from it in his own mind
in horror. In a moment, with a quick gesture, he wrote these words: —

“They hated and fought and killed each other:

And God in shame covered their blood with His own grass.”

The beauty of the thought was only equalled by its daring. It is his spirit, ever
new, ever young, ever fresh with the fullness of new life, and tender with the wisdom
of sorrow, that has continually won my heart and quickened my inner spirit.

There is a sentence in the Book of the Psalms of David that I have often
remembered when Rabindranath Tagore’s personality has come before me in some
unexpected aspect of greatness. The Psalmist speaking to the Divine Lord says:

“Thy humility hath made me great.”

That verse is true of the Poet. The divine humility in him has made him great.
He is humble as a little child. The immortal spirit within him, keeping him thus
childlike, has wrought this sovereign inspiration of true genius.

There is one more significant passage, this time taken from the Sermon on the
Mount, which seems more than any other to complete for me the whole picture. It
runs thus: —

“Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.”

In the untarnished mirror of his own innocent and childlike heart the vision of
God is reflected.

C. F, ANDREWS

I do not know Tagore personally, but I do ardently admire his works. Please
send him my warm admiration and regards.

LONDON

JAMES BARRIE

It gives me great pleasure to express on behalf of my Government to Rabindra¬
nath Tagore on the occasion of the publication of the Golden Book of Tagore the
best wishes for the future. The general admiration felt for him has found a beauti¬
ful expression in the Golden Book. Many thousands of my fellow-countrymen join
the great poet’s Indian followers in gratitude for his donations to mankind and wish
that for many years to come Rabindranath Tagore will continue to be to the German
people the outstanding interpreter of Indian philosophy, poetry and wisdom.

COUNT R. BASSEWITZ

GERMAN CONSULATE,
CALCUTTA

A TAGORE, DESDE EL MEDITERRANEO

Piramide truncada,

Talado acento.

Bosque sin auras.

Paletadas de niebla,
humeda tierra,
sobre la barca negra.

Adolescentes quiero
para el cortado arbol!

Canten desnudas, duras,
la sumergida isla.

Huya la sombra y arda
frente a los soles vivos.

Desnudas, duras, firmes
canten en corro verde.

II.

La luz sobre la sombra cauta.

1 Prado en Aries!

En zodiacos de yerba
pastan soles de naipe.

Entre margenes
vienen cielos y nubes,
llegan arboles.

Las ramas iza, amante.

! Las ramas y las aves!

Entra conmigo en este
bosque de claridades.

III.

Vuelven los dias tetradinamos,
los dias de precipitados azules,
los dias que cristalizan en rombos.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Tienen mas luz los campos,
mas luz las viejas torres,
mas luz el mar y las distancias.

Bajo el solsticio de verano

miro a la tardc y siento:

es este cielo el mio,

cs este cielo el que me eleva;

este cielo, tan puro,

que no cobija ofertas ni demandas.

Los arboles halagenos,
los huertos y las aves,
los muros de sal viva
lo alaban en sus cantos.

Es este cielo el que me eleva,

este cielo tan puro

donde mis ojos desembocan,

CARTAGENA ANTONIO OLIVER BELMAS

TAGORE AND TUKARAM

F rom the Known to the Unknown is the accepted Language of Science. But
here is the Language of the Heart hailing from the Unknown to the Known.
During the two years of my stay at Harvard (1912'14) I was fortunate in
passing most of my time in the company of a few Bengali friends and colleagues,
one of whom—a Doctor of Philosophy now, and Professor in one of the younger
Indian Universities—I discovered one morning with a Bengali book under his pillow,
which turned out to be a volume of Rabindranath Tagore’s Poems. And my
friend was so enthusiastic over the work that he prevailed upon me to learn Bengali
and so help him to augment his own happiness in reading the Poems by getting me
to share it with him. I did so: but unfamiliarity with the Bengali script came
in the way of my making much progress in reading “Rabi Babu’s” Poems in the
original. How earnestly I wished it then—as I do even tO'day—that at least a
selection of the Poet’s masterpieces is made available in Devanagari characters!

I had later the good fortune to meet the Poet himself during his visit to America
in 1913. We then naturally wanted the Harvard University to arrange a course
of lectures by Rabindranath. These American lectures of the Poet have been
published since under the title of Sadhana; but would it be believed that before
arranging these lectures at the University the officials there wanted to know whether
the Poet (who had just then been awarded the Nobel Prize) could speak English!
The disillusion soon followed when the whole audience stood enthralled by the
rhythmic cadence and the bafflingly mystic suggestiveness of the periods as they
flowed forth from one of the most musical of male voices that I have ever heard.
And an American lady who was amongst the audience a few seats in front of me,
unwilling perhaps to believe that such mellifluous English could be spoken by one
who did not claim it as his mother^tongue, observed to her neighbour: “Don’t
you think that his face is so wonderfully like that of Christ?’’—to which the other
replied: “But even Christ was an Asiatic, you know!’’

My Bengali friends prevailed upon Rabindranath to give a musical recitation
of some of his poems in the original Bengali. Amongst the recitations given on the
occasion was the Rigvedic Sukta (VII. 89) with the refrain—

^ il

—and I can never forget the thrill that went through me as I heard the Poet’s voice
rising and falling with surging inward emotion as the penitent Vedic Sage plain-
tively cried:

“Save me, my Sov’ran Lord, Save me! ’’

Amongst the mystic poets of Maharashtra Tukaram comes nearest to Tagore in
directness of diction and the pathetic grandeur of the appeal, and I cannot

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

conclude this humble tribute of mine better than by quoting one of the welhknown
Abhangas of Tukaram that one can hear to this day in Maharashtra from the mouth
of some “Kathaka," or “Kirtana-kara*' as we call him:

m:oT, i ^ i ll ^ ii

3TT!T^ I 1 ¥|>T STTST || ^ |\

I cm^T cm*! 5nF5T | ^3 ?T |1 ^ il

^ 51 ^, g t 'W i < qrT^ i l sn^if ii a a

5TTo^ TOcftgr I vnq i ^ qrqTf a H a
7 ^ =3^1^^ 3j»ff I ir snff I sTSjftqf a ^ a

—Induprakash Edition, 2668.

[Translation: My death I witnessed with my (own) eyes; it turned out a
festivity without compare, (i) With joy the three worlds got crowded: there
ensued experience of the oneness-of^Self^in-all. (2) I had lived in the Particular,
swayed by Egoism: By renouncing that has arrived this happy time. (3) Ended is
the impurity-period of birth and death: I have remained apart from the limita¬
tions of the "I” and “Mine.” (4) Narayana has afforded me an abode to reside:
Reposing faith I have resorted to His Feet. (5) Says Tuka: What has been
imprinted upon the whole world, that to my own person I have applied.]

POONA S. K. BELVALKAR

THE POET AS UNITER

S OME lines of an English poet have been quoted till no self-respecting person
can quote them any more, lines asserting that East is East, and West is
West, and that “never the twain shall meet.” But the quotation, stopping
there, is really unfair to the poet in question j for the poem goes on to reverse the
scntimetit, to assert that when two brave men meet, coming from opposite ends of
the earth, all difference of race is done away: “there is neither East nor West,
border nor breed nor birth.” The object, that is to say, of the Pdet in this parti¬
cular passage is not to insist upon difference, but to point to something which
unites in spite of difference. There is a value, he says, which all men who are
fully men recognize, to whatever part of the earth they belong, the value of manly
strength of spirit: that recognition makes them one. But what Rudyard Kipling
says here of one particular kind of value is true of many other kinds of value, recog¬
nized by the spirit of man universally, apprehensions of spiritual and moral worth,
apprehensions of beauty; in their case too, men, in spite of abiding differences, meet
in a communion in which “border and breed and birth” cease to count. Poetry is
one of these uniting vajues; it is not the English only who understand the
significance of Wordsworth, nor the Indians only who understand that of
Rabindranath Tagore. In days therefore when antagonisms between race and race,
between nation and nation, between one element in a country and another element,
are perplexing and grieving all those who would like to see the human family
advance by co-operation in the great tasks set before it, the poet who gives the
world some new beauty in enjoying which men may forget their differences, is doing
a work of great practical importance. It is certain that the only way by which the
antagonisms of men can be overcome is by the growth of common interests. It is
little use exhorting the different hostile groups to be at one; but if they discover
some great interest which they have in common, the antagonisms fade away.
Interest in literature is, of course, only one of the interests which transcend
differences of race and nation, and it would be absurd to suppose that literary
interest alone could cure the divisions of to-day. But literary interest may be one
strand in a web of interests which draw men together, and the poet who weaves
that strand may be doing his part in a great work of uniting. He may seem to
live retired and to make his songs only for his own delight or a little group round
about him, yet going abroad through the wide world those songs may help to make
the world a kindlier world than it is to-day.

LONDON EDWYN BEVAN

‘SHOW US THE RIGHT PATH'

‘Whom the Gods wish to foster, him they endow with Right Intelligence and
Righteous Will'—so declares the great scriptural Epic of India:

g ST ^ I

He who has this Sad'Buddhi will unfailingly achieve everything that is worth
having. Therefore has the heart of man, in every time and clime, prayed for it,
prayed for the Intelligence that shows the Right Path, prayed to be kept away from
the wrong path, in the Aryan Gayatri, the Muslim Namaz, the Lord's Prayer of the
Christian.

When a nation has been chastened sufficiently, and prays, in the deeps of its
heart, sincerely, passionately, compassionately, then Right Intelligence is given to it
by the Oversoul, Vishv-atma, Ruh-i-Kull, Anima Mundi, the World-pervading,
Unconscious and supremely Supra-conscious, in the shape of great leaders. When
a nation begins to produce great leaders—that is a sign that happier days are returning
to it.

India has been producing such in recent years: a spiritual leader unrivalled,
who has, by his tapas, performed the miracle of converting a vast heterogeneous
crowd into an organised army, has shown it the Right Path, and given it the deter¬
mined will to walk upon it, who has transformed the sordid face of political struggle
into a thing of ascetic beauty and riveted upon it the astonished, sympathetic,
respectful and expectant gaze of the nations of the earth; an orator-poetess whose
eloquent plea for the Mother-land has been heard with attention in four continents ;
scientists of international fame, one of whom has been presented by the scientific
world with a world-mark of honor; speakers, writers, jurists, equal to those of any
land. Even in aviation, and games and sports, sons of India have been taking their
place side by side with the foremost of other countries, in skill, in daring, in
endurance.

Seniormost, among her living sons, of the uplifters of the head of our Mother
India from the tear-wet dust in which it had lain for long, leader of thought whose
name is known most widely on the surface of the earth, with the one exception of
him whom we lovingly and reverently call Bapu and Mahatmaji, is our World-Poet,
whom we affectionately speak of as ‘Thakur Dada*. He has re-interpreted for us
the ancient teachings of the Upanishads and the Bhaktas, embodied them in wonder¬
ful language which makes them newly alive and invests them with fresh beauty, not
only for us, the children of India, but also for the children of other lands, and thereby
helps to bring the hearts of all nearer to one another.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The best, the highest, in his song, is the same as the song of the Upanishads,
the song of the Bhaktas. It is the song of that Higher Self, which, pervading all
life, appears as Love, as Sympathy, as Fellow-feeling, as that sense of Universal
Brotherhood which shall prevail some day, however much the forces of Hate, of Evil,
of the lower self, the inverted false reflection of the Higher —Dxmon est Deus
Inversus —may try to thwart it.

Where the Higher Self reigns, in cottage or in palace, in village or in town, in
home or in market-place, in place of business or in place of recreation, in journalist’s
room or in judge’s court, in panchayat or in army, in hall of education or hall of
legislation—wherever the Higher Self reigns, there is the Kingdom of Heaven, there
are love and trust, there are selflessness and philanthropy, there are eager co-operation
and strong organisation for the good and the happiness of all. Where the Higher
Self is ignored and flouted, where the lower self reigns, there is the Kingdom of
Satan, there are mutual jealousy and hate, selfishness and cruelty, pride and fear, lust
and greed, perpetual struggle between all for the private profit and power and
pleasure of each, and therefore the good and the happiness of none.

To Thakur Dada, for reminding the nations of the earth, by the power of his
beautiful words, of that Higher Self which is the only source of the Light that
illumines the Righteous Path of Life, which is the One and Only Basis of true Self-
government, without the recognition of which such Self-government is impossible,
I offer my tribute of homage, on his completing seventy years of a life devoted to the
worship of inner and outer Beauty.

BENARES BHAGAVAN-DAS

MY IMPRESSIONS ABOUT THE POET

T agore has become a household word in the Bombay Presidency, especially
is Maharashtra. Years ago some o£ the hymns o£ Maharshi Devendranath
Tagore were translated into Marathi. They are still sung and highly
appreciated, as much £or their poetic expression as £or their spiritual import.

In the monsoon o£ 1905 I was in Calcutta acting £or the late Dr. Bloch o£ the
Archaeological Department. The political agitation against the partition o£ Bengal
was then in £ull swing. I was new to Bengal, but had made many Bengali £riends.
Even so early as 1905 everywhere among the elite o£ the society I £ound the songs
o£ Rabi Babu £ar more £requently sung than those o£ other Bengali poets. The most
favourite tunes o£ that time which we constantly heard were Ekla chalo re, Bidhir
bidhan katbe tumi emni saktiman, the meaning and the music o£ which was much
relished by me. But, strange to say, I had no occasion o£ meeting the Poet that
year.

Many things happened a£ter my return to Poona in the cold season o£ 1905.
Rabi Babu was £ast becoming a world celebrity. Some o£ his poems were translated
into English and attracted the attention o£ not only Europe and America but also
o£ parts o£ India outside Bengal, where Bengali was not understood. One o£ his
books, the Gitanjali, so much engrossed the mind o£ the late Sir Narayan Chanda-
varkar that he made it a text-book o£ the Students' Brotherhood in Bombay and
delivered many discourses on the message o£ the Poet. When the poems o£ Tagore
were once known to the Western World, it was but natural that he should be a
recipient not only o£ the Nobel Prize but also o£ the Knighthood that was con£erred
upon him by the Government o£ India.

In 1917 I came to Calcutta as Carmichael Pro£essor o£ the Calcutta University.
I came now here with a more reverent attitude towards Rabi Babu. The discourses
delivered by the late Sir Narayan on the Gitanjali not only had made Tagore popular
among the intelligentsia o£ the Bombay Presidency but also held him up as a seer,
a poet with some definite message to give to the world. This admiration and
reverence £or the Poet was very much enhanced when I came to Calcutta in 1917
and heard about what was being done by him at Santiniketan to bring the East
and the West together. Many Indologists, such as Prof. Sten Konow, Dr. Sylvain
^evi, Prof. Winternitz, later on came to India in that connection, and we cannot
but be grateful to the Poet for inviting western savants into Bengal. In 1917
I certainly was far more fortunate than in 1905, because I actually saw the Poet not
once but several times. When I met him first at Jorasanko, he struck me as the
handsomest man of the age. His eyes were certainly most enchanting, although the
Poet was then on the wrong side of fifty-five. But there was something deeper in

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

his eyes. Every time I met him, I tried to study him, to obtain an insight into
his inner soul through the expression of his face. Although I have seen him many
a time, I confess my study has not yet been completed, though each time it is
becoming more and more engrossing. It is not quite clear to me why they have
not yet made a portrait of the Poet that would do him justice. Bengal is noted
for painters. But it is inexplicable why none of them has made the Poet’s face
an object of special study. I wonder why no Bengali painter has yet come forward
and done for him what Lenbach, for instance, has done for Bismarck. It is true
that Lenbach has made Bismarck, but Bismarck has thereby made Lenbach also.
I am sure if any young Bengali painter does such a portrait of the Poet, he will
thereby immortalise himself.

Having come to Calcutta and stayed here almost for good, it was impossible
not to study his works first hand. Curiously enough, his longer works never
appealed to me so much as his smaller. And I cannot help saying that his GalpU'
guchchha and KathU'O'Kahini are unrivalled. Most of his songs especially are
beautiful, not only in their import but also in their melody. He is not only a word
painter but also a musician. Everywhere in his poems and songs you see sunshine,
storm, floods, still night, and various other aspects of nature. Whenever he went
from Bombay to Poona, as he told me once, the mountainous scenery of the Bore
Ghaut enthralled his mind, not only by its beauty, but also by its sublimity. Rabi
Babu is thus not a detached idealist, not a detached symbolist, not a detached
psychologist, but he is everything that is based on the real. His is a mind most
responsive to nature, and he sees the invisible always through the visible. A better
tribute to the Poet and Seer of this description I cannot offer than by translating the
following hymn of the Maharashtra poet^saint Tukaram, because the mentality of
Tukaram reflected in it seems to be that of the Poet also:

"Trees, creepers, and denizens of the wilds are my companions.

The birds also are pleasing through their sweet notes.

The sky is the canopy, and the earth the seat. My mind revels there.

The breezes make me feel (the passing of) time. A quilt and water-pot

alone are for bodily needs.

Songs about Hari form my sustenance. This variety I enjoy with zest.

On account of this felicity I appreciate residence in solitude. No blemish,

no vice, can touch me there.

Says Tuka—there is converse with my own mind. And I hold discourse

with my own self.”

UNIVERSITY OF CALCUTTA D. R. BHANDARKAR

RABINDRANATH AND VISVA^BHARATI

L ife expresses itself through the medium of the body, ideas seek forms for self¬
manifestation, Idea is the inner soul, form is external. Without content
there can be no form—it would be dead matter, being devoid of rhythmic
vibration; neither is content without form possible, as it would be mere vacuity,
eternally homeless. Therefore, ideas seek embodiment, while forms seek ideas.

Many are those who perceive the mere body, being unable to apprehend the
indwelling life, the soul. They consider the lines of a picture to be final, they cannot
pierce through them to the majesty of the idea. Their realization must ever remain
untrue, their knowledge incomplete.

We must also note that the external body, the form, may not have attained
beauty, attractive to the eye, yet the soul, the idea within may be very great.

In appraising the truth about Visva-bharati let us bear all this in mind. Visva-
bharati is an idea, of course it has also a form, but we must not identify its apparent
form with the idea. Its form that we see now is small, but that does not as well
indicate a corresponding narrowness of idea. The form that we see of it to-day may
change to-morrow ; again, inspite of the change of form, the idea may not change at
all. From birth onward the body passess through a series of changes, but the soul
remains the same j so that if we fix our mind on the changing form its substance too
may appear to us to be naught.

When the body is in bondage it is painful, but when the soul is in fetters it is
still more painful. Because in the former condition our manhood does not suffer,
while slavery of the spirit reduces us to the level of the beast. It is not that external
bonds are negligible but lack of spiritual freedom is fatal for us and must be relent¬
lessly fought against.

In our intensive effort to solve our political problems we found new and newer
manacles being forged for us, instead of our being able to cut through them once for
all. Hemmed in from all sides i.by oppressive party-walls, our country was fast
losing its power to recognize man as man. We were still proud of those ancient days
of India when Bharata gave its eternal message to the Visva, but we could not hearken
to its call with our hearts burdened by anger, hate and contending illusions. In
those dark days of our country, in the Asrama of Santiniketan the vision of
the Visva'Bharati slowly dawned in the heart of Rabindranath. That great
realisation of the ancient Rishis came to Rabindranath; yatra visvam hhavO'
ty eku'nidam —‘There Where the Whole World unites in a Nest.’ We have to
spread an Asana of pure friendliness on which can gather all in unity; where man
can meet man in a free relationship of joy; where country, politics, dogma, religious
faiths and sectarian names can create no barrier; where the path for both accepting

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

and bestowing the worthiest contributions of the world will ever be open; where all
thoughts will unite Bharata with Visva, and not separate them ; where all actions will
be towards the welfare of the whole, and not against it; where good will be world’s
good, love will embrace the world-humanity; and peace will be peace of the world.

This is the ideal image of Visva'Bharati ; it is gracious, it is beautiful, it is
beneficial. It has to be established by each one of us, nobody can merely receive
it from another. It awaits individual realization, not borrowed display.

Through Rabindranath, in this very Asrama this great idea has manifested
itself, but it has no limitation in space, no termination in time, it is not bound in its
expression to Santiniketan, or to any particular locality. Any attempt to monopolise
it will be fatal to its truth, obscuring the eternal radiance of its purity. This
thought-image of Visva^Bharati is in each thinker’s heart ; in this country, in other
countries near and far. The bodily manifestation of Visva'Bharati we now find in
Santiniketan ; in the future it may be in another place: let it be so.

This particular manifestation of Visva'Bharati is naturally vitally connected with
India, the land of its birth. In one of its aspects it is concerned with the explora¬
tion of the different avenues of Indian thought and culture; in the other, it seeks to
gather knowledge about the contributions of countries beyond the confines of India.
For knowledge, which is the generator of welfare, deserves respectful study as know¬
ledge itself, whether its birth has been in India or outside of it. On this great truth
rests the foundation of Visva'Bharati. In its Research Departments, diverse branches
of knowledge which flourished in the past in countries other than India, cultures that
are dimmed or almost lost by the passage of time, engage the closest attention of its
scholars. Visva'Bharati needs co-operation with the outside world in order fully to
know humanity, to remove its barriers of ignorance in its progressive attainment of
truth.

On the 8th of Paush, Bengali Year 1325, during the annual festival in Santi¬
niketan the idea of the Visva'Bharati was first formulated; in the next year, on the
18th of Ashadh, Visva'Bharati was formally established. The words with which
Rabindranath closed his inspiring address on that occasion may be remembered now:

* Visva'Bharati is a great idea, though it has appeared in our midst in a material
shape which is small. The arrival of the Great in the disguise of the very little,
however, happens everyday in life. Let us therefore rejoice in the fact of its coming,
let the auspicious music be sounded. Let us earnestly hope that this infant is the
messenger bringing Amrita from the gods, that this nectar of divine life will make
it live from within, make it grow, and also make us live and grow into fulness.’

Has not time given any justification of this prophecy?

SANTINIKETAN VIDUSEKHAR BHATTACHARYYA

For Mercy, Courage, Kindness, Mirth,
There is no measure upon earth:

Nay, they wither, root and stem.

If an end be set to them.

Overbrim and overflow.

If your own soul you would know.
For the spirit, born to bless.

Lives but in its own excess.

BRITISH MUSEUM,
LONDON

LAURENCE BINYON

H e is India bringing to Europe a new divine symbol, not the Cross, but the
Lotus. His wisdom knows no age, it is old as the rivers of India and younger
than even childhood, for there shimmers in it something in^born, which will
not be revealed until the Morrow, His poetry belongs to no school—the flowers of
Bengal were created by sun and rain.

His love for his fcllowmen is not the love of the Samaritan, but of the Song of
Songs. He knows that just as the dew drop in the grass may mirror the Heajk^ens, so
the human mind may reflect God.

His religion knows neither hope nor fear. It dwells in the calm of the
Spiritual Universe which nothing but the human heart can comprehend.

HVALSTAD, NORWAY JOHAN BOJER

OT^tral secretariat library

Government of India.

H. F. AMIEL, JOURNAL INTIME
Juillet 20, 1876

Am Poete et sage Rabindranath Tagore, qui a sonde la profondeur d'dme, et
explore les richesses de pensee d'H.F. Amiel, je presente, en respectueux hommage,
ces pages inedites de son Journal Intime.

GENEVE BERNARD BOUVIER

L ’IMAGINATION agrandit tout. II est probablement moins difficile de mourir
qu’on ne le croit. Quand on n’a plus la force de vivre, on meurt; et la mort
a tout Fair d’etre le repos.

Ce n’est pas le neant qui me fait frissonner, c’est I’impuissance de la longue
douleur, c’est la soufErance sans consolations et sans espoir. J’eprouve aussi une vague
anxiete de la conscience, et qui sait si cettc solitude qui est un supplice n’est pas aussi
un peche.

Cette defiance incurable de la dcstinee, qui se refuse aux conditions de la vie
biimaine, parce qu’elle a penetre le redoutable secret de I’illusion, c’est le Pessimisme.
Mais le Pessimisme est peut^etre le peche centre le St Esprit, car il maudit froidement
la Creation. Tu ne maudis pas, toi, mais e'est par douceuer, inconsequence et
peiit-etre faiblesse.

Scepticisme, apathie, desesperance. Tu n’as plus la force d’esperer, ni celle de
vouloir. C’est pourquoi tu n’es plus de ce monde, ou tout repose sur I’apre amour
de la vie et sur I’impetueux desir. Tu n’es plus qu’une pensee qui a conscience de sa
prochaine disparition, une bulle d’iris qui assiste a son eclosion fugitive et aux
metamorphoses de sa coloration ephemere, le rien qui se sait rien et admire le quelque
chose. L’ame n’est peut-etre qu’un phenomene de phosporence du second degre ;
c’est la forme d’une forme, le diagramme fantastique du MYSTERE universal, un
dessin dans lei vide, un eclair symbolique de la creation, une miniature du feu
d’artifice que Maia se tire depuis I’eternite.

L’intellectualisme est une philosophie ; le moralisme en est une autre, I’esthetisme
une troisieme. Comprendre le monde, tendre a la saintete, creer la beaute, voila trois
types d’existence ; et que d’autres encore: viser a la volupte, exploiter les choses et
les gens, poursuivre la gloire ne ressemblent nullement aux trois premiers; et il me
semble que le coeur a encore une autre philosophie et que vivre pour I’amour est une
septieme maniere d’entendre la vie, celle que goutent particulierement les femmes.

Les difEerentes manieres d’entendre la vie et d’expliquer le monde, ce sont ies
divers morales pratiques et les divers systemes de philosophie. Notre instinct domi¬
nant tend a nous emprisonner dans I’une de ces cases; la culture spirituelle se
propose de nous les faire parcourir toutes; la liberte critique consiste a rester
au'dessus de ces geoles et a les envisager dans leur liaison, comme parties d’un plus
vaste ensemble.

To The Guru,

Rabindranath Tagore

One foggy spring eve in Sweden it seemed to me as if a string of light were all
of a sudden Ht through the mist, and I wondered what it might mean.

The same eve I heard your name uttered for the first time.

As Marconi’s pressing of a button on the Eletta in the Mediterranean caused all
the lights in Melbourne to glow, so your message to the world' in beautiful song
suddenly burst on thousands and thousands of yearning hearts in the West, shedding
a new light over man’s destiny. Once such a flame is lit, it always goes on burning,
like lamps in sacred places.

You opened vistas to the Western world, that it might see what has been the
glory of India from time immemorial—the spirit which goaded on her saints and her
heroes in epic and in history to holy greatness.

Who has like you mingled the strains of joy and sorrow into one song, where
“mirth spreads from leaf to leaf and gladness without measure,’’ enabling us to realize
“the joy that sits still with its tears on the red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws
everything it has upon the dust and knows not a word’’?

To those who have understood your message there shall be no fear left on earth.

Therefore to-day the flower of undying gratitude is planted in your courtyard.

OSLO, NORWAY ANDREA BUTENSCHON

A GREETING

I T has been said that a man can live three days without water, but not a day
without poetry. The thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore have that awareness,
truth, and beauty which are of the very substance of life. I salute the great
poet of India, who is to all the, world a fount of life and a healer of souls.

STATE UNIVERSITY OF lOV. 'ois.A. SUDHINDRA BOSE

RABINDRANATH JAGORE

I T was my privilege to meet Rabindranath Tagore when he visited England in 1912.
We spent an evening together with a small company at the house o£ a mutual
friend, the late Sir Richard Stapley. It was an experience which ever since has
lived vividly in my memory and to which I have recurred in thought again and again.
The poet’s personal appearance one could never forget, even had there been nothing
more in regard to the influence emanating from him to fix and retain the attention
of those present. I have never seen anyone before or since who came so near to one’s
ideal of what Jesus of Nazareth must have looked like in the days of His flesh. Nor
was I alone in thinking so ; our host spoke of the fact to me privately as did several
others. Mr. Tagore at that time was in the prime of life, spare, erect, with pale
slightly olive-tinted complexion, luminous eyes, long, wavy, light brown hair and
beard. His expression was gentle and winning, and his whole personality combined
in a remarkable way high intelligence with benevolence and unself'conscious dignity.
H is demeanour is more patriarchal now; the light brown hair has become white ;
but in other respects, as his portraits evince, he has not changed. Of no man living
can it be more truly said that a glorious spirit animates and dominates a mortal frame.

His conversation on that evening, 1 remember, was charming and courteous but
restrained. He was not voluble, rather the contrary, though entirely at ease with his
fellow guests. He seemed to be at home with them and to like them, as is perhaps
easy to understand when it is noted that one of the most distinguished was Evelyn
Underhill, author of important works on Mysticism and mystical writers. Another
was Edmond Holmes, author of T he Creed of Buddha, a book to which happy allusion
was made by Mr. Tagore. The poet read to us in his quiet silvery voice his then
unpublished mystical play. The King of the Dark Chamber, It was a revelation to
us of the power and freshness of a great creative mind uttering itself in lucid, nervous,
beautiful English. Later in the evening the reader told me that until he was nineteen
he knew no English. A marvel indeed, that one of the greatest forces in the Renais'
sance of his own native Bengali Literature should also have beccm.e one of the greatest
masters of contemporary English prose I I am told that he did not begin to write
in English until he was fifty. I have all his books on my shelves now, and when'
ever I opei> one of them I can still hear that quiet musical voice repeating the words
as 1 heard it to the muffled accompaniment cf the London traffic outside on that
memorable evening nearly twenty years ago.

Rabindranath Tagore’s own spiritual evolution has made him one of the mightiest
prophets of the coming unity cf mankind of whom history will preserve the record.
His ardent nationalism of earlier days has long been sublimated into a passion for the
v elding together of all peoples into a God-conscious whole. That is why he has
dedicated his life not only to the East but to the V. .•-7. and not simply in song but in

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

service. Perhaps Gitanjali gives us the acme of his attainment of this vision ; at least
it has not been surpassed.

“Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given
me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near
and made a brother of the stranger.

When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh,
grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the
One in the play of the many."

But the product of the poet’s soul which 1 love best and which contains the
ripest fruit of his meditations was not written for publication at all. It is the collec'
tion of his letters to his friend C. F. Andrews, recording his reflections during his
tour of Europe and America in 1920-21. The moral insight displayed is unerring
and pierces to the very quick of our habitudes and conventional assumptions. Herein
is enshrined a new gospel of the East to the West, for it is nothing less, and we shall
forbear to learn it at our peril. The East is teaching us through the voice of Rabindra¬
nath Tagore and those who think and act with him that there is no salvation in
pelf and material might, that strength is made perfect in weakness and lordship in
love. Faithful as is the diagnosis of our conditions, no less faithful to the promise
of the religion that the West professes to revere is the following, mailed from New
York:

Those who are in posession of material resources have become slaves of their own
instruments. Fortunately for us, in India, these resources are beyond all immediate
possibility of realization. We are disarmed, and therefore we have no option but to seek
for other and higher sources of power. The men who believe in the reality of brute force
have made enormous sacrifices in order to maintain it. Tet us, in India, have faith in the
moral power in man and be ready to sacrifice for it all we have. Let us do our best to
prove that Man has not been the greatest mistake in Creation. Let it not be said that, for
the sake of peace and happiness in the world, the physical brutes were preferable to the
intellectual brutes who boast of their factory-made teeth and nails and poison fangs.
*###***

The truth that moral force is a higher power than brute force will be proved by the
people who are unarmed. Life, in its higher development, has thrown off its tremendous
burden of armour and a prodigious quantity of flesh, till man has become the conqueror
of the brute world. The day is sure to come when the frail man of spirit, completely
unhampered by air-fleets and dreadnoughts, will prove that the meek are to inherit the
earth,-

This is the authentic note. This is the specific message that the pain-racked,
unhappy, violence-riven world most needs to hear at the present critical hour. But
will it listen? Once more the eternal has found an instrument ii) a singer who sings
of heaven amid the clamorous noises of earth. We thank God for the avatar, and
await its fulfilment.

CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL R. J. CAMPBELL

CHICHESTER, SUSSEX, ENGLAND

THE POET AT WORK

R abindranath has spoken of self'Creatlon as the religion of man. This
process subsumes the countless drives of human effort and aspiration in a deep
continuous flow of personality which outgrows its limits in a progressive
manifestation of being.

As a self-creative artist Rabindranath’s evolving personality on its path of
fulfilment has opened up realms of expression in a varied response to life. These
creations of Art,—poems, songs, dramas and painting, represent an individuality
revealing itself in the universal context of being, in the background of a wide world
of humanity.

There are other aspects of the Poet’s self-creation unknown to the public, which
perhaps those v/ho have been near to him in daily life may have viewed in a correct
perspective of significance.

But Rabindranath is alive, indeed more profoundly alive than others, because
of an intense energy of spirit which is the special prerogative of genius. We cannot
detach the unfolding story of his living moments from their condensations into Art.
\ et we shall knock at some backdoors in the Poet’s mental workshop—may be
glimpses will be vouchsafed to us into the character of his creative activities.

It is said that a man’s library betrays the intimacies of his mind. Certainly the
Poet’s peregrinations in the world of printed matter have left their mark in the
Visvabharati Library, which largely consists of his personal collections. Browsing in
its cool chambers, loitering in the lanes of books vibrant with the silent thoroughfare
of thoughts, we have stumbled upon strange data of which these inconsequential
pages is the result.

We have discovered, to mention only a few items, that the Poet in his
tendencies is not only a farmer but a philologist; historian as well as physician; a
keen student of astro-physics, geology, bio-chemistry, entomology. We find liim
actively engaged in co-operative banking, experimenting with sericulture, indoor
decoration, production of hides, manures, sugar-cane and oil; organizing local pottery,
weaving-looms, lacquer-work; introducing tractors, formulating new schemes of
village economies, and new recipes for cooking. Books on lighting and drainage
system, calligraphy, plant-grafting and meteorology show unmistakable signs of
pencilled perusal; synthetic dyes, parlour games, not to speak of whole encyclopaedias
and comparative dictionaries have been probed by his lance-like intellect. Egypto¬
logy, road-making, incubators, wood-blocks, elocution and Jiu-jitsu have competed
with printing presses and stall-feeding for equal claims on his attention.

Incongruously netted, this represents but one day’s haul of facts. We could
have added more; but lest a casual reader unacquainted with local lore be perplexed

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

by these seemingly unpoetical acquisitions o£ the Poet’s mind, we would refer him
to Santiniketan and Sriniketan for proof positive of actual and systematic application
of all the branches of knowledge mentioned above, and more. Few people outside
know that he has been all through his life a pioneer of indigenous industries and
enterprises, sparing neither his personal resources nor his right to leisure for raising
the efficiency level of his people and their sinking reserves of self-assurance. Truant
all his life from the fenced grooves of professional education, no one has surrendered
himself more readily or completely than the Poet, to the harness of strenuous civic
works of practical utility. Even in the days of his youthful isolation on the Ganges,
while engrossed in literary work, he was one with the children of the soil, whose
sorrows and sufferings found his active response in remedial measures, in far-sighted
agrarian policies. He played his role as landlord and a friend of the people with
consummate sagacity. Official records and cherished traditions in the Tagore estate
in Bengal prove his remarkable organising capacity and aptitude for entering into
and throwing illuminative practical suggestions upon complex details of village life,
involving economic, religious and psychological issues. Students of his social and
political writings know something of his pioneer ideas of co-operative enterprise,
collective farming, village panchayets and the revival of arts and crafts and indigenous
manufactured goods through organized annual fairs. An adequate chronicle of his
constructive efforts, made at a time when such ideas were not only unknown to our
own people but unappreciated in other' countries, waits to be penned.

The utter helplessness of our people called him forth into yet closer co-operation
with them in the arena of public affairs. The Swadeshi movement in Bengal claimed
him as its hero. Not only in stirring poems and songs, and innumerable socio¬
political lectures and addresses but in original schemes of rural reconstruction, social
reform, and revival of indigenous industries he laid the foundation of the National
Renaissance of Bengal. The re-awakening and gradual self-assertion of India as a
whole owes its direct inspiration to the cultural revival of Bengal. May it be noted
in passing that even in the stormy Swadeshi days the Poet never for a moment
swerved from his prophetic faith that the welfare of India involved the emancipation
of total humanity in a mutual interdependence of freedom shared by the common¬
wealth of man? He never failed to remind his countrymen that barriers of national
greed and exploitation have to be heroically demolished, not because a country can
ever afford to indulge in suicidal isolation, but to provide a basis of equality and
justice on which alone, freed from the shadow of parasitism, the peoples of the world
now cruelly separated by the organised racial animosity of Nations can meet in a
healthy commerce of goodwill.

We know the genesis of Santiniketan, and something of the history of its growth
through the unrelenting self-sacrifice of one practical idealist who refused to yield to
the hostile indifference of sceptical compatriots and the inherent obstacles of an
unnatural political situation. That he triumphed will be evident to any one who visits

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

tO'day the different departments of Santiniketan and of its sister institution, the
Rural Reconstruction centre at Sriniketan. Will it strike the visitor's realization that
the various departments, with their multifarious activities, arc but the projections
of a poet’s personality whose constant guidance and inspiration explain their
existence?

The wide range of the Poet’s perusal of books will now take on an added
significance. Quick to reach at the basic values of new ideas and efforts he has
gathered suggestions from all quarters and readily invited expert opinion and trained
workers in launching practical enterprises and in establishing them. Much remains
to be done, in fact, whole vistas of development lie ahead of us, but the beginning
has been made. It required the impetus of a tremendous personality to break through
the inertia of inclement circumstance, and an impoverished will-power which clogs
all progress in our country. The Poet in his pilgrimage through life has taken up
the challenge of the many-sided urges of his personality, moulding at the same time,
through vital experiences of growth, the destiny of our nation itself.

This is how he has educated himself and his countrymen. In this attempt to
deal completely with life in an intimately comprehensive manner will be found a
clue to his principle of education. The human child is born to this world of life with
a native self-creative impulse which seeks the direct stimulus of life itself. The aim
of education is to equip man to face the totality of life, eliminating obstacles of
ignorance and improper adjustment, developing resourcefulness, training the senses
and the intellectual mind. The educator is there to inspire man with creative
energy, by surrounding him with the atmosphere of living, growing thoughts and
actions. In this educational colony of Santiniketan the Poet looks to the trees, and
birds, the wide expanses of meadow and sky to join hands with the elder companions
of the pupils, the educators, who would bring their gatherings of life to the open-air
classes, in teaching the children how to live. It is his desire that the artists at work,
the musicians improvising on their instruments, the scholars engrossed at their desks
shall constantly radiate their influence into the receptive minds of children, who thus
would feel drawn to experiment with their own creative persuasions. The various
technical departments are there to challenge their curiosity, their inherent craft-
making instincts compelling them to seek the directing guidance of their teachers in
the exciting game of giving shape to things. With a wide-awake sense of wonder
the children roam through the pathways of life, knowing, feeling, possessing, cease¬
lessly growing and outgrowing themselves in an expanding fulness of being. The
allurement of books grows upon them, enlivening their study-periods with the
surprises of unexpected riches. Guests come from distant lands to remind and assure
them of the claims of common humanity in an idiom which can be translated into
their own.

In his education scheme the Poet cherishes the hope that a sympathetic interest
in their neighbours will be awakened in the minds of the students and some day they

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

will be fully trained to organize medical relief work, sports, fairs as well as recitations,
musical performances and dramas, and carry them to the heart of surrounding villages
where life is cheerless, unhealthy and uncreative. Pioneer girls practise Jiu-jitsu,
sword-play, and outdoor games, taking equal part with the boys in managing the
civic affairs of the miniature metropolis of Santiniketan. The class hours of study
are but an integral part of the whole life of education built up by the self-expressive
activities of students and teachers alike, growing up together in an atmosphere of
human aspiration harmoniously adjusted with the cyclic pilgrimage of seasons, the
pageantry of the cosmic life of the Universe.

Santiniketan and Sriniketan are the consummation of the Poet’s idea of educa¬
tion. Education to him is commensurate with the entire process of our living, of
becoming, of directing our personality along widening intensities of growth. The
painful memory of his own boyhood’s contact with school-life, his constant dealings
with the victims and perpetrators of a borrowed paraphernalia of imperial education,
and his wide-travelled experiences of some of the modern pedagogic cults dragooning
human personality into standardised grooves of respectability had been preying on
his mind, suggesting to him the idea of launching an educational project in which he
could concretise his ideas of creative education for children.

The Poet’s ideal of a complete life of education emanated from the tradition of
our country, as it persists in Sanskrit literature and history, in which Masters who had
attained perfection in their lives blended their daily existence with those of youthful
devotees of knowledge, initiating them into a life of truth through constant personal
contact. In his sensitive recoil from the swift-spreading blight of a prim and
supercilious modernity, fostered by pseudo-scientific education, hardening ingrained
prejudices into callously unquestioning cants of civilization, and putting the premium
on half-truths, fragmentary self-assertion, and one-eyed professionalism, the Poet’s
anguished soul first found its sanctuary in the vision of the ancient Tapovanas of
India, serene abodes of culture in the forest retreats where human personality was
given its spiritual food in a pervasive atmosphere of harmony with life, a harmony
achieved through work and meditation, through exploration of all living avenues of
knowledge, of the natural universe as well as of its indwelling spirit. Communion
with the supreme source of realization based itself on a large awareness of the
significance of the Many in creation, a consciousness which vitalizes our richly diverse
human nature with the urgency of a unifying purpose. Students of the hermitages
tended cattle, brought fire-wood for cooking, cultivated pasture land, devoting
themselves no less keenly to the service of the community than to the acquirement
of wisdom from their Masters, round whom they gathered in search of Truth. The
home, the school, the life of civic responsibility were thus welded in one; teachers
and the taught participated in a corporate life detached from the vicissitudes of
uncontrolled urban excitement, yet preserving in full the chromatic elements of
struggle and effort, of varied pursuits and diversions which compose the normal day

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

of human life. It is not possible fully to recreate this atmosphere in our days, but
the Poet has attempted with inevitable adjustment to make this ideal dynamic in a
modern setting, harmonising its comprehensive simplicity with the amenities ol
scientific progress.

The library shelves point out that in this supremely difficult achievement of
organizing available knowledge from past and present. West and East, into a luminous
vision of the perfect, the Poet nourished his native synthetizing genius with assiduous
garnering from wide areas of study. His representation of India is not built of
idyllic concepts of a visionary golden age but of actualisations of a living past, a
growing present, silhouetted against the background of historic truth. Sanskrit
literature, sociology and abstruse philosophical texts have disclosed their inner truths
to lus exacting imagination. Erudite commentaries, modern and classical, have not
been spared. From the eddying transience of current affairs, the obscurity of the
ob\'ious in the kaleidoscopic panorama of surrounding events, he has discovered the
intangible continuity of India’s spiritual life flowing in myriad channels through the
heart of our repressed humanity. Different strata of progress and retrogression have
revealed to him the unique mind of India which is perennially self-renewing in its
precious gift to the commonwealth of Man. In folk-lore, artistic traditions, festivals
and religious fairs, in the tree-shaded, river-skirted usual life of Indian villages the
Poet’s comprehension has found evidence of this undying India waiting to be redeemed
from the etiolation of neglectful centuries. This India he has made known to the
world, seeking to establish a confluence of cultures in which will mingle India’s
spiritual waters with those of other lands. Rabindranath’s internationalism is the
self-creative harmonisation of fully awakened national humanities. As an educator
of nations he shows us that the elusive links of a common destiny hold humanity
together in its progressive manifestation of the world-mind of Man.

The Poet is at work. Visitors pour into his study corner, autograph books
pile up high on the desk, letters and cables gather from four quarters of the globe,
urgent messages seek advice, confer patronships, invite presidential lectures, claim
articles, subscriptions, names for the new-born, medicines for the sick, help for foreign
travel, tips for out-manoeuvring the Nobel Prize Committee. Our college, school,
the art-and-craft rural-work centres, local meetings, afternoon gatherings, financial
committees tackle his mind with an interminable procession of problems. Children,
seniors, diverse local officials, correspondents, interviewers, and press-agents annihilate
all available margin of his working day. Photographers, tourists, authors, hunters,
baronets, struggling artists, round-the-world-cyclists, visionary poets, women aviators,
political readers and misleaders parade on the narrow arena of his door step, each
considerately assuring to take up only a few minutes of his time. Books hurry
through the post, proof-copies for introductions, first copies for review, pamphlets for
immediate attention. Books with blazing covers, fancy letterings ; ordinary, extra¬
ordinary, sensation-of-the-year books ; books with oriental atmosphere, raw modern

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

flavour, archaeological, pathological, ethereal and underworldly books speaking in a
babel of tongues. Magazines, newspapers, American tabloids and news-digests,
documents and Blue Books speed through continents and seas to his desk. You would
consider one’s daily share of two dimensions hardly enough to accommodate so much.
Yet, there is time for each letter, space for visitors; problems are quietly faced, meetings
attended. We have not spoken of the regular classes, evening readings, participation
in informal discussions and debates with groups of students through which he keeps
an intimate touch with the heart of our educational commune, inspiring its members
with his generous approachability, his irresistible friendliness. And if, once more,
you turn to a particular section of the Library, you will find books steadily growing,
books of poems, stories, essays, drama, products of his untiring pen. And, Paintings.
By the score they wing their way through the blue of his mind, to be netted in a
magic web of colours and contours unprecedented in technique and imagining. Of
his self-creative lila this is the latest phase.

The Poet is incessantly at work. Far-reaching schemes crowd into his brain,
just now, the resolve to found a Women’s University darkens his brows with a con¬
centrated urgency of expectation. Having all his life given voice in poignant litera¬
ture to their inmost travail and fulfilment, roused our women to self-assertion,
inaugurated brightening reforms, he has pioneered co-education in his school till it
has spread successfully all over the country. He must yet establish for them a full-
fledged University to give complete scope to their self-expression. Original schemes
for civic training for women, co-ordinated methods to help forward their manual and
intellectual self-liberation moulding individual latencies into character, and diverse
technical, vital innovations in education have matured in the Poet’s mind through
a life-time of experience and thought ready to be utilised. He waits while he works,
strives to create clement circumstance to materialize his dream, knowing too that in
the purity of truth’s appeal lies its conscriptive power.

In the Poet’s unhurried accomplishment of daily work, in the serenity of his
self-possessed detachment which guides his intense gift of absorption into every detail
of life will be found his harmonising principle of conduct. Through congregated
distractions his mind hearkens back each day to the primal notes of creation, tuning
itself to the pure music of life which is resonant in the Earth and Air, in green blades
of grass, in flower and leaves. Hardly able to walk, early in the dawn he must yet
visit the nursery of growing trees in front of his house in Uttarayana, to wish them
a good day. He is ever an eager student in the school of life, with insatiable wonder
in his heart for what is to come, for all the amazing things that are. In appraising
a personality of such rare and complete self-creation, we must realize that its signi¬
ficance is not only a challenge for the present, but a prophecy of the future of Man.

SANTINIKETAN AMIYA C. CHAKRAVARTY

HOMENAJE A TAGORE DESDE ESPANA

[Retorno.

He vuelto por el camino sin yerba.

Voy al rio en busca de mi sombra.

Que soledad sellada, de luna fria.

Que soledad de agua sin sirenas rojas.

Que soledad de pinos acidos, errantes.

Voy a recojer mis ojos
abandonados en la orilla.

[Acercate.

Mira que junto a la nocbe te cspero.

Como su corazon y el mio»
emiten radiaciones luminosas.

Nadame.

Puentes profundas y frias
avivan mi corriente.

Mira que puras son mis charcas,
que gozo el de mi yelo.

III

Guardare mi voz en un pozo de lumbre
y sera crepusculo toda la vida.

Ya giraran mas leves los cuchillos
porque no encontraran donde herirme.
(Erguida de rocios negros,
para ti, cantare.)

Que no me busquen los sin vista,
que no me llamen los ahogados,
que no me sientan los que huyo.

A mi soledad de reflejos,

Amor, solo tu.

CARTAGENA

CARMEN CONDE

FROM CHINA

Greetings and Pest Wishes.

PRESIDENT

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
PEIPING

R abindranath Tagore’s place in the hierarchy of poets and writers of all
ages will be assessed by those who follow us, but we who are his con¬
temporaries know well the great power he has wielded and the influence
he has exercised over life and thought during the last half century. Rabindranath
and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee were the apostles of the renaissance, which, taking
its rise in Bengal, spread through the length and breadth of India. Nor has his
influence been confined to the purely cultural sphere. He has won renown as an
educational reformer, a keen protagonist of social reform and a political thinker of
wide sympathy and understanding. Not only has his creative genius been univer¬
sally recognised but it has given our country a high place for intellectual achievement
among the nations. His influence has been one of the primary factors of the day
which are welding together in harmony and concord the peoples of the world.

ATUL C. CHATTERJEE

LONDON

LE PROPHETE D'ASIE

II etait assis dans sa robe aux larges manches sacerdotales,

Nous formions un cercle attentif et incline autour de lui.

II parlaitj Sa voix caressante et melodieusement egale
Coulait en eau surnaturelle dans le silence du salon recueilli.

Ses gestes languides et souples avaient des noblesses felines,

Sa barbe de soie argentee filait tres bas sur la poitrine,

Et il gardait volontiers en parlant ses paupieres tres long baissees,

Comme pour contenir et gouter la modulation des pensees.

Puis il decouvrait tout a coup dans un eclair sombre et serein
Le regard ardent et voile des yeux dont le blanc meme est brun.

Le mage d’un Orient d’amour et le poete au mystere de brahmane,
Celui'la dont la voix lointaine nous avait pris des longtemps par un charme,
(Le charme d’un parfum trcublant dans ime lumiere diaphane)

Etait la aujourd’hui parmi nous.

Son sourire insistant et doux

Paraissait entr’ouvrir des ciels. Sa voix de liquide lumiere

Etait belle comme la voix de miel des vieillards harmonieux d’Homere.

Son esprit lucide et lustral purifiait le monde en le pensant..

Il refletait ce pauvre monde tavele de macules de sang.

Il voulait I’Europe et I’Asie accordes comme un chant d’hymen
D’oii naitrait enfin I’ame humaine.

Et nous laissions fluer en nous la simple presence d’un prophete.

“La seule existence d’un tel homme, avait dit I’un de nous, est un bienfait.**
}e me rappellerai toujours le regard de joie serieuse, le souffle contenu
De deux jeunes filles presque enfants qui le contemplaient suspendues.

Les peintres ont seme de ces visages extatiques de beaute severe
Et de plenitude silencieuse le long de la voie du Calvaire.

Quand nous sommes sortis a sa suite, il pleuvait sur le vieux domaine
En de lentes gouttes pensives, comme dans certains des ses poemes
Le soir respirait sous le tiede malaise d’un orage printanier
Et les gouttes s’etalaient clapotantes sur le feuillage plat des marronniers
Comme elles doivent s’ecraser la-bas sur les feuilles sonores des bambous.
Les pelouses luisaient et le sable mouille des allees etait roux.

La pluie brassait I’odeur de vie des fleurs de mai,

Et de la terre montait bienfaisante une humide fraicheur embaumee.

Dans le pare un oiseau isole modulait des notes si profondes
Qu’on eut dit la pensee du monde

GENEVE L. CHARLES'BAUDOUIN

TAGORE AND THE REBIRTH OF BENGAL’S SOUL

T O the present hour, we Bengalis thrill at our remembrance of the new light
that suffused our eastern skies, the new life that came pouring into the
depths of our being in the opening years of the century. Swadeshi had
dawned on Bengal. The qualities that lie on the Godward side of man reappeared
in the Bengali one by one—faith, courage, hope, aspiration, defiance of death. The
sureness of accent with which he pronounced his faith in his country and its future
took India by storm, and soon began to make itself heard across the seas. The
Bengali stepped right out of his dead self—^a miracle of resurrection! Art, science,
music and the spirit of research burst synchronously into life. A new protestantism
was abroad against wrong. Men consecrated their lives to the service of fellowmen 5
a new chivalry revealed itself towards women, who began building a nev/ freedom
on it; missions of mercy sprang up to lessen suffering and pain. The call for brother-
hood that had immemorially gone up from India’s submerged children awakened a
new response in the conscience of the twice-born. National industries raised their
head. Institutions of national education were founded to revive and keep alive the
philosophy of self-realisation and the ethics of Ahimsa, which were re-discovered
by the Bengali as constituting India’s abiding contribution to culture. And the
political life of Bengal transformed itself beyond recognition.

11 .

This passage of Bengal from darkness to dawn, the immersion of the Bengali,
body and spirit, in the holy waters of a resurgent life, the maddening ecstasy born
of his soul’s vision of its lost self, was transparently not the freak of an hour, no
momentary flashing of a fugitive hope, no illusion. For the Bengali has gone on
ever since growing from more to more. Have we not been the privileged witnesses
of one of those visitations of Divinity in man in the hour of his soul’s flagging and
failing, the light of which illumines the story of man?

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

All great movements of human renewal have had their prophets. Who was
the prophet of the one of which we are speaking? Bengal will answer with one
voice—Rabindranath Tagore. Was he not of the great company of Bengal’s chosen
few—the eldest of her sons whose ears, more finely attuned, had been filled with the
cry of the Indian earth, whose souls had flown across the night of time to commune
with the spirits of those aristocrats of humanity who had up'built the indestructible
foundations of India’s civilisation? Tagore, who came after Ram Mohun Roy,
Debendranath Tagore, Keshub Chunder Sen, Ramakrishna and Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee, was the soubmate of every one of them and gathered up into his
personality the essence of what they had thought and taught. And the reality
strikes us to-day with the force of a revelation that a full score of years before the
bursting of Swadeshi on Bengal, he wrote and sang with intuition and passion of all
the great and the small things that marked the Bengali’s re-entry into the life
everlasting.

It was Tagore’s words of fire, uttered in poetry and prose, that compelled his
educated countrymen to the realisation that they were making priceless clowns of
themselves by wrapping the imitation of Englishmen’s clothes round their persons.
Was he not the one distinguished son of Bengal who always appeared in immaculate
dhoti in the midst of the Anglo-maniacs of the last century? The memory abides
with us of how the one has since become many. It was Tagore, again, who rid
his fellow-Bengalis of the nightmare under the seizure of which they had been dis¬
gracing their little ones by labelling them with English names. It was he, too, who
righted the perversion of the Bengali mentality that had led Bengalis to import as
many English words as they could into their daily converse with fellow-men, and
even women. Tagore deliberately introduced the vogue of expressing oneself in
unadulterated Bengali in conversation with one’s countrymen ; and he won through,
thanks to the time-spirit asserting itself through him. And what of the Bengali
language itself? Bankim, indeed, had given it its modernity, and brought it up into
conterminous rank with the tongues that were swaying the minds of men. But is
it not Tagore who forced the secrets out of its heart, invested the very soul of it
W'ith the luminous garment of a divine potency that has since enabled it to catch the
reflexions of the universe, to register the smallest ticking of the human heart no
less distinctly than the thunder of high heaven, reveal and make real the infinitude
of nuances of tones and colours inside the souls of man and woman with no less
clarity and definition than the sights and sounds of the outer earth and heaven?

The plastic stress of Tagore’s genius was making itself felt, as time went on,
in the deeper strata of the Bengali’s soul. The Bengali, who is a born mystic and
lover of beauty, had felt his soul being ravished by the entrancing mysticism and
beauty of English romantic poetry with which his “English education’’ had brought
him into intimate contact. And cut off from all vitalising intimacy with Sanslcrit
or old Bengali Vaishnavic literature—thanks to the aforesaid education—and finding

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

nothing in the contemporary literature of Bengal to match the music and the inspira¬
tion of the English Muse, the educated Bengali confessed himself a scorner of his
mother-tongue, and a worshipper of England’s literature and language. And then—
about forty years back from to-day—he experienced the shock of a real surprise,
intellectual and spiritual, as he read through a poem, christened Sonar Tari, by
Rabindranath Tagore. For, here was a singer who seemed to incarnate the very
spirit of romantic poetry. Sonar Tari revealed all the nature-love of Wordsworth,
the sensitiveness of Keats to the beauty that caresses us from the face of things
sensed and the equal glory of Shelley’s music. And overlying it all, persistently
playing over it, was the shadow (or was it a rarefied, ethereal light?) that the unseen
but not unfelt soul of the universe throws over the human soul. Other poems
followed in quick succession, each bearing a fresh revelation of Tagore the poet, and
of the unsuspected richness and music hidden so long in the heart of the Bengali
language.

Tagore completed the poetic conversion of the Bengali before Sonar Tari had
gone round three summers. And his love of nature was equalled by his love of
man. All the unshed tears of man and woman were falling like dew-drops from
his pen ; all the human wistfulness, all the longing for what is not that has stirred in
the bosom of humanity cried out to one from the lines of Paras Pathar ; and all the
dream of beauty that has visited men, ever since the early dawning of it in the
primaeval founders of the race who scratched the reindeer on bones and sang and
danced to an unbidden ecstasy in their souls, found its one adequate, heart-wrung
utterance in Urvasi. In this last-named marvel of poetic creation Tagore used
words as chisels—to the accompaniment of a ravishing music coming out of each of
his strokes—to carve out before his reader’s mind’s eye that perfect figure of ideal
beauty which entered into art’s im.mortality from the moment of its birth. The same
sense of delight and discovery surprised his countrymen poring over his prose works,
his short stories, and his contributions to art, religion and sociology. Apart from
their setting of abundant poetry and astonishing beauty, Tagore’s utterances appealed
to the educated Bengali by reason of the essential reality underlying them. There
was no note discernible in his writings and sayings—he often spoke at public gather¬
ings—of what some critics of our literature have implied by the phrase “Oriental
Exaggeration.’’ He led no revolt against the ascertained facts of science regarding
man and nature. Even in his tensest moments of ecstatic utterance, in poetry or
prose, Tagore and truth were one. He was also bringing out his earlier dramas—
each one of them a string of lyrical moments. And he was writing novels too. And
for the first time they eased the hidden ache in his countrymen who had long been
reading Bengali novels in vain for a sight of the new Bengali, man and woman,
specially the latter, whom the impinging of the West upon the East would be bound
to bring into existence. Tagore’s novels gave Bengal pre-visions of the coming being
in most fascinatingly differing stages of readjustment between the old and the new.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Just think of the hcart-cIutching figure of Binodini in Chokher Bali! And this brings
one to the Tagorean apotheosis of woman which has redeemed the men of Bengal.
The chivalry into which the modern Bengali has been reinitiated by him makes all
the difference between the Bengal of the last century and of the twentieth. And
it is Tagore, once again, in whose creative brain were reflected the prototypes of the
growing variety of Bengal’s new women. Do not the living pictures of some of
them step out of his later novels and his dramas with their highly modern problems?

How and where is one to end the story of Tagore and New Bengal? The
roots of the former’s being have so intertwined themselves in and about the latter’s
heartstrings that the two are become one. Take the wonderful religious literature
that Tagore has given us, not only the hymns that he has written from his boyhood
up, but also all his utterances in prose on the topic of God and man. Where is the
Bengali whose being has not brimmed over with his thoughts on that elemental issue
of life? And let us just think how his hymns have gone deep down into us, become
part of our soul-substance, how they interpenetrate and inform the Bengali’s daily
thinking and doing. What about Tagore’s songs of death? Who but he has opened
the eyes of Bengal to the new vision of death as life’s crowning consummation, as the
bearer of the soul of man along the stairway to immortality?

Allied to his attitude towards death is Tagore’s interpretation of sorrow. He
has taught us to look on suffering as the discipline enforced on us by a Higher Power,
interested in us, which hurts the human soul the better to heal it. He indeed has
brought us healing such as none have since the age of Chaitanya.

And lastly, what is the history of Bengali patriotism?

Every Bengali knows that Bankim had built the temple of Anandamath, and
put the image of the Mother in it, and also composed the Mantra which held the
secret of life in its heart. But who was it that walked up the steps of the temple,
entered its holy of holies, and wrested the secret out of its heart, and breathed it into
the image so that it became a thing of life? Rabindranath Tagore. The vision that
had filled the eyes of Bankim alone during his life-time found itself translated into
the revelation of Mother India incarnate before the enraptured gaze of all Bengal,
only after the Bengali had been touched by the spiritual alchemy of Tagore’s trans¬
figuring pen. Not that he was for a moment identifying India’s existing conditions
with perfection—the besetting error of the mass of his contemporary patriotic prattlers
and pen-men. Far from it. Tagore insisted in words of burning eloquence that
India must be purged of all the putrescent accretions of her Dark Age. The deep
pathos of his impassionate pleading for the submerged, for the untouchable, moved
hs3 countrymen to tears. He would have India impress science into her service at
every stage. But he called upon his countrymen in deep earnestness to abandon
their ungodly attempt to turn India into Anglo-India. In permitting themselves
to think of it, were they not flying in the face of the very science and history which
Europe had taught them? No nation with a history behind it, such as the people

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

of India had, could grow away from it, any more than it could grow out of its skin.
And what do we find as we examine into her past? ,The formulation by the makers
of her history and civilisation of a higher ideal of human perfection than any other
known to humanity ; a philosophy and an ethic that alone can, and shall, on a glorious
day of God’s ordaining yet to be, lift mankind on to that shining tableland of the
spirit whereon all mankind shall kneel together to worship the sun of truth. He
based his great prophecy on a luminous study of the achievements of India’s culture
between the ages of the Upanishads and of Gautama Buddha, and found confirma¬
tions of the one great purpose of her history in all the later manifestations of her
spirit in poetry, philosophy or religious ecstasy.

So Tagore gave Bengal a great ideal to transfer her allegiance to—one that soon
struck music out of the^ chords so long silent in her race-consciousness, and started an
upheaval of her national spirit. How that spirit grew and gathered invincible strength
within the span of a decade was demonstrated by the way it reacted to Lord Curzon’s
unwitting effort to drive the point of his sword into it. How one’s memory rushes
back to the stupendous Town Hall gathering, vibrant and quickening with a new
hope, hungrily drinking in Tagore’s singing of Sonar Bangla, and joining in the
chorus with himl How the wonderful songs of freedom flowed from his pen one
after another to intensify the new-found patriotism of the Bengali, to nerve him
for the struggle in which he would be inevitably involved in seeking and ensuring
his new freedom! And the speeches that he delivered in quick succession in the
same year appeared to be the direct revelations of his seer’s madness. Bengal bowed
to Tagore. And his soul seemed to be floating in among Bengal’s men and women,
like his Sonar Tart, with Beauty in the prow and Truth at the helm, and its precious
load of golden corn, his gathered and garnered love for the motherland.

Not an avenue of our reawakened life but reaches back to Tagore. And on this
auspicious and spacious morning that marks the 70th year of his sonship of Bengal,
our hearts go out in salutation to him—thinker, singer, dreamer, poet, prophet, creator
of Sonar Bangla.

Tagore —A Praise without End,

CALCUTTA B. C. CHATTERJEE

VAK^PATI

Sam Sabdaih —‘With Words, Welfare.’

With the above aphorism a mediaeval Sanskrit grammarian begins his work,
af :er his salutation to God in the time-honoured formula—

0th Namah Sivdya.

The benediction invoked by Bopadeva embodies the romance, the mystery, and
the truth of speech. Speech is wonderful, one marvels at its power. Speech gives
expression to that which is, and to the Idea. Speech sped man on his path in life.
E\'er since he began his quest for well-being and joy, for welfare and happiness.
Speech has been a strong staff for him.

feat -phthdgma kal anemSeti phronema ediddksato ;

Man’s greatest achievement, which raised him from the mere animal, was when
he taught himself Speech, the symbol of his Thought, swift as the wind.

Brhaspate prathamdth vdc6 dgratit ydt pmirata ndma-dheyam dddhdndh,
ydd, esdm sresthaih ydd ariprdm dsU prena tdd esdm nlhitarh guhdvih.

‘When men, O Brihaspati, giving names to objects, sent out Vak’s first and earliest

utterances.

All that was excellent and spotless, treasured within them, was disclosed through

their affection.’

sdkium iva tUaiind pundnto ydtra dhtrd mdnasa vd'eam dkrata,
dtra sdkhdyali sdkhyd’ni jdnate ; bhadrdi^dm lak^mtr nihitd'dhi vdci.

‘\^'^here, like men cleansing corn-flour in a cribble, the wise in spirit have created

language,

Fnends see and recognize the marks of friendship: their speech retains the blessed

sign imprinted.’

The goal and end of man’s existence and life we wish to comprehend and to
attain through speech. Sages, Saints and Poets have used speech with this aim.
yajnena vdcdh padaviyam dyan, tarn dnv avindann rsisu prdvistdm :
td'ni dbhr'lyd vi adadhuh purutrd", tarn sapid rebha abhi sdm navante.

‘With sacrifice the trace of Vak they followed, and found her harbouring within

the Rishis:

Tliey brought her, dealt her forth in many places: seven singers make her tones

resound in concert.’

Many are the Rishis—the Sages and Poets—but only to few has Vak, the
Goddess of Speech, manifested Herself.

utd tvah pdsyan nd dadarda vd’eam ; utd tvah srnvdn nd irnoti endni:
uto tuasmdi tanuam vi sasre — jdyS'va pdtya uSafi su-vd’sdh.

‘One man hath ne’er seen Vak, and yet he seeth: one man hath hearing, but hath

never heard her.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

But to another hath she shov/n her beauty, as a fond well-dressed wife to her husband.’

Rabindranath is one of those to whom the Goddess of Speech has given Her
special blessing. Where else do we find Her manifesting herself with such power and
such grace as in Rabindranath?

kds chdndasdm ydgam. a veda d'hirah, k6 dhtsnidm prdii vd'cam papdda?

‘What sage hath learned the metre’s application? Who hath gained Vak, the spirit's

aim and object?’

He is not only the Poet, the Master Music-maker, at whose playing the words
come and dance in a ring ; not only the Wizard, who works magic with words: he
is also the Sage, the first of our sages in these latter days, who saw and pondered over
words, and made them reveal to him the secrets of their form and meaning.

For he is also first among our students of language, who both read the past of
his mother-tongue and drew out its hidden powers. With clear vision, born of the
wise man’s observation, he indicated, in his essays, which are of permanent value
for the study of his mother-tongue Bengali, the right lines of enquiry and deliberation
regarding the nature and history of our language. A great creator, with divine
power behind him, the power of his genius, he is also the patient analyser.

Nullum tetigit, quod non ornaviti nothing did he touch, which he did not
adorn. In him we have the greatest writer of Bengali, and at the same time one of
its foremost philologists.

From one who is seeking to read the mysterious ways of words and of Speech
in India, and who has been blessed in his quest by the approbation of the Master,
this Homage and this Prayer on the present auspicious occasion:

Homage to Rabindranath, the Poet and Seer, the Vak'pati, Lord and Master
of Speech:

Homage to the Princeps, the Inaugurator, of Speech-research in his Mother-
tongue ;

Homage to the Pathi'krt, the Path-maker iu the domain of Speech.

mahd drnah Sdrasvafi prd cetayati ketund:
dhlyo vtsvd vi rajati.

‘Sarasvati, the mighty flood,—She, with her light, illuminates:

She brightens every thought.’

codayitn sunr Idndm celatiit su-matlnd'm :
yajndm d'adhe Sarasvati.

‘Inciter of all pleasant songs, Inspirer of all gracious thought,

Sarasvati accept our rite.’

md' nah pdri khyad dksard cdranti:

‘Let not the Deity of Speech, the swift-moving, the imperishable, neglect us.’

THE UNIVERSITY, SUNITI KUMAR CHATTERJI

CALCUTTA

THE CHOICE

If choose I must a resting-place
What time my feet begin to fail,

By God’s most hospitable grace
I choose a brook-side in a vale.

I ask not ocean’s trumpetings,

Or hills that hearken to the skies;

For one is loud with questionings.

And one is silent with replies.

But by my brooklet’s lyric leap
My heart may contemplate at ease.

Life’s deep desirings for the deep
Mingled with mountain memories;

And mine own rivulet of rhyme
May run from summit unto sea.

Singing between the banks of Time
The music of Eternity.

SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA JAMES H. COUSINS

PROSA E POESIA

P ROSA e poesia. Nella prima, lo studio e' a trattare la parola in modo che non si
faccia valere per se’, ma quasi sparisca nel pcnsicro, e sia un* acqua cosi’ limpida
e transparente che non si avverta come acqua. Nella secondat la parola spicca
in primo piano, e come immaginc e canto ci riempie dei suoi colori e suoni. Qui' e*
tutta la differenza tra pensiero e fantasia, tra logica ed estetica. Cattivo prosatore
chi lavora la prosa (dico la prosa dottrinale e ragionante) come poesia. Cattivo
poeta chi riduce la poesia a prosastica esposizione di sentimenti e di riflessioni.

Perche* la votazione di “impressioni’* non da’ poesia? Perche’ quelle votazioni
sono come tante parole smozzicate, nessuna intera. Affinche’ risuoni intera, bisogna,
neir impressione come nella parola, mettere tutta I’anima; e allora I’impressione si
approfondisce, si arricchisce, raccoglie intorno a se’ I’intero Mondo, e si amplia a
poesia. Altrimenti, si rimane in un trastullarsi pratico e voluttuario.

NAPOLI, ITALIA BENEDETJO CROCE

PROSE AND POETRY

Prose and Poetry: In the first, the study consists in treating the word in
such a way that the word ceases to have any value as a mere word and almost loses
itself in Thought and emerges limpid and transparent, like a flow of water that could
not even be noticed as water.

In the second, the word assumes the first place and like Imagination and Song,
fills us up with colour and sound. Herein lies the difference between Thought and
Fancy, Logic and Aesthetic. He is a bad prose'Writer who labours.at prose—I mean
the dogmatic and conscious prose—leaning towards poetry. He is a bad poet who
reduces poetry to a prosaic exhibition of sentiments and reflections.

Why does any offering of “impressions” as such, not give us Poetry? Because
such offerings are not complete but are mere broken words. To make it ring true
and perfect one must put his entire soul in the impression as well as in the word.
And then the impression deepens and enriches itself, gathering round it the whole
world and flowering spontaneously into Poetry; otherwise one feels imprisoned in
the circle of a childish ephemiral pastime.

NAPLES, ITALY BENEDETTO CROCE

DR. TAGORE AND CULTURAL PROGRESS

O NE of the many services rendered by Dr. Rabindranath Tagore to society is
that of cultural progress. Culture is the sum total of the group experience
of a people. The origin of culture lies in human nature itself. The object
of life is to live and, in order to live, man must adapt himself to environment. Out
of this adaptation of the inner self to the outer world arises the experience, which,
becoming group habit, expresses itself in folk'Ways, modes, laws and institutions.
While a part of this experience is devoted to the technique of mere living, the otlier
relates to ethical and aesthetic values, such as art, philosophy and religion.

Although culture is thus the product of group life, individual contribution to
it is by no means negligible. In fact, the landmarks of cultural development are the
contributions of great personalities. Like heredity, t.e., the like producing the like,
variation is also the law of nature and every individual differing from the rest is a
potential centre of a new culture. The significance of a genius lies in the fact that
a certain trait of human nature is developed in him in the highest degree. A genius
is thus a great cultural focus, giving a social process a new direction of development
or creating something of everlasting value to society. Dr. Tagore is a great creative
genius. His contributions to religious, philosophical and political thought, poetry,
music, painting, fiction, the drama, the histrionic art, and essays form a great
treasure to the world’s literature and art. He has given a new meaning to human
life and created new ideals for human achievement.

The revival of the old cutural systems is another service of Dr. Tagore. Owing
to the difference in racial traits and environmental conditions, cultures differ from
one another both in time and place. This diversity is, however, a positive gain to
society. It not only adds to its richness, but also paves the way to further develop¬
ment. Like the Hebrew, Greek and Roman cultures, Indian culture has also
enriched the world and given rise to many new cultural ideals.

For sometime past, there has, however, been a distinct deterioration of Indian
culture. There is a two-fold reason for this decline: First, India has been invaded
and conquered by several peoples, who have directly and indirectly suppressed her
cultural ideals. Second, in the presence of more vigorous, aggressive and dynamic
cultures, Indian culture has lost some of its ideals and imitated others by the law of
suggestion. From this condition, India is slowly but surely reviving her cultural
ideals, especially since the beginning of the present century.

Dr. Tagore is a pioneer in this renaissance movement in India. Nationalism,
swadeshi, and rural reconstruction all owe a good deal to him. His writings and his
active participation in reconstruction processes have become a source of inspiration
to his countrymen in their struggles for national emancipation and cultural regenera¬
tion. Even in reviving the old cultural systems. Dr. Tagore has added new values
to them. Dr. Tagore is in fact a leader of mankind. His contribution to culture
stands out as a great landmark in human progress.

GENEVA

RAJANI KANTA DAS

DR. TAGORE AS A UTILITARIAN IDEALIST

D r. Rabindranath Tagore has long been acclaimed as the world’s greatest
living poet. He has achieved immortality and, along with the names of
such poets as Homer, Virgil and Dante, his name will undoubtedly pass to
posterity.

That Dr. Tagore is a sage, seer and philosopher is also known to the world.
He has personally brought the message of the East to the West and has preached
the doctrine of peace and harmony among the nations. Recently his paintings have
received recognition in various countries, especially in Russia. In fact. Dr. Tagore
is a many-sided genius and one of the world’s greatest artists.

As an artist, Dr. Tagore is naturally an idealist. He has sought after the per¬
fection of human actions and human relations in “the good, the true, the beautiful,”
and has given mankind a conception of harmony in apparent conflict, a perception
of the eternal in things ephemeral, and a vision of the beautiful in existing ugliness.
He has thus created new values of human life and opened up new sources of human
happiness.

While standing high among the world’s greatest idealists. Dr. Tagore differs
from most of them in being also a utilitarian. Idealism led Plato write his Republic,
More his Utopia and Bacon his New Atlantis, but Dr. Tagore, as a utilitarian idealist,
founded Santiniketan, the seat of Visva-Bharati or International University.

Nature herself has made Santiniketan a beautiful place. Azure sky, floating
clouds, gorgeous sun-set, seasonal flowers and singing birds all add to the charm of
the spot. But the significance of Santiniketan lies in the fact that here one of the
world’s greatest idealists has attempted to realise his dream of “the good, the true, the
beautiful” in actual life. Gymnastics and dancing, drawing and painting, sculp¬
ture and architecture, music and drama, language and literature, and even arts and
crafts are cultivated, and Hindu, Islamic and Western Cultures are studied under
the direction of eminent Indian and foreign professors. The East and the West
meet for the mutual understanding and appreciation of what is the best in art,
philosophy and religion.

Dr. Tagore is a unique personality. He has combined in himself the vision
of an artist and the benevolence of a utilitarian. On the occasion of his 70th
Birthday, we all wish him many more years of his unique service to humanity.

geneva SONYA RUTH DAS

INDIAN FREEDOM AND RABINDRANATH

I T is generally asserted by many British Imperialists that the question of Indian
Freedom will be determined by the will of the British people, expressed through
the British Parliament. Some Indian nationalists think that India’s destiny rests
with them ; and they do not need any outside help. Indian moderates and some
British statesmen of liberal tendencies think that India’s future will depend upon
Indo'British co-operation. They advocate that India should remain as a part of tlie
British Empire. But the truth is, the future of India concerns the whole world ;
and therefore many non-Indians have given their best efforts to serve the cause of
Indian freedom. The problem of Indian freedom will be solved neither by the
dic tation of the British, nor even solely by the efforts of Indian nationalists. India
will be free and independent through the combined efforts of the Indian people arid
the support of world forces—reflexes of world politics, international finance and
commerce and international public opinion. In time there will be a Federated
Republic of the United States of India, which will proclaim sovereignty of the people
of India and contribute its share to human progress.

Intelligent and effective efforts for Indian freedom, on the part of the people of
India, presupposes a thorough revolution of ideas. This cannot be achieved in a year
or a decade. Fortunately for India, at least since the days of the late Raja Ram
Mohun Roy (who may be regarded as the greatest modern-man of India), the needed
revolution of ideas has been in progress. In recent years, through the accumulated
efforts of unnumbered patriots, during the period of more than a century, many-
sided activities in favour of Indian freedom have gained strength and power. As
years pass by, it will be more clearly recognised that Rishi Rabindranath made a very
substantial contribution to the cause of Indian freedom. His work and teachings
have supplied the philosophical foundation of the ideal of assertion of India as a free
and independent nation, which has taken root in the heart and soul of Young India.
Ri<:hi Rabindranath, through his writings and songs, has helped to revolutionise the
political as well as social ideology of the Indian intelligentsia, who in their turn have
awakened the masses. One may say that during the second half of the nineteenth
century and early twentieth century, Swami Dayananda, Swami Vivekananda, Rtshi
Rabindranath, Lokamanya Tilak, Sri Aurobindo and others laid the spiritual founda¬
tion of the Indian Nationalist Movement. Swami Vivekananda and Rishi Rabindra¬
nath vitalised the struggle for Indian Independence with the doctrine of Fearlessness
and Service. Rishi Rabindranath is not an Indian political leader nor is he a political
revolutionist. He may be regarded as one of the preceptors of the Indian youth in
the creed of Indian freedom. He may be compared with Fichte, who was one of the
torch-bearers of the cause of German emancipation from foreign yoke.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The torch of freedom that has been held high by Rabindranath is not a dim
one. He is sending forth messages for the political, social and religious emancipation
of India. In his Swadeshi Samaj and other works and songs he has given us his
ideas of political emancipation. In his poem Brahmana —the story of Jabalu
Satyakama —and other works he has given us a clear insight into his social philosophy.
In fact he has demanded that Hindu society should free itself from the degenerating
influences of dead habits and superstitions. In his Sadhana and other works he has
given expression to his religious convictions. At the ‘Visva-Bharati’ (Dr. Tagore’s
International University) he has tried to give practical demonstration of his ideal
of ‘creative unity’ and a programme of cultural collaboration for world unity and
promotion of peace with justice and freedom.

Rabindranath’s unique contribution to the cause of Indian freedom has been
in his cultural activities on an international scale. Not being engaged in leading
the Indian nationalist movement, he did not make any attempt to lay the foundation
for future foreign relations of Nationalist India; yet he roused Japan and China
with a feeling of sympathy and kinship for India. In the United States of America,
in Germany, in France, in Italy, in the Scandanavian countries, and even in Great
Britain, he has roused the consciousness of some people to the fact that dwarfing
the people of India through political and economic slavery caused by an alien
domination and the lack of education of the people of India, which was once the
giver of civilization to the world, is a great and distinct loss to the world at large.
Rabindranath’s cultural activities, in some cases indirectly, helped those Indian
statesmen and exiles, who are not narrow-minded isolationists and are trying to
utilise world forces in favour of Indian freedom, by establishing international
political contact with free and independent nations.

May he live long to promote the cause of Indian freedom; because without
Indian freedom, there cannot be any freedom for the East. Without freedom for
the people of Asia, all efforts for better understanding between the East and the
West will be futile.

BADEN-BADEN, GERMANY TARAKNATH DAS

MYSTICISM OF RABINDRANATH

T here is a good deal of divergence of views regarding the meaning of the term
Mysticism. In the West it has been taken to be the feeling of ecstasy through
which a mystic enters into communion with God. In my Harris Foundation
Lectures on Hindu Mysticism I pointed out that such definitions are inadequate in
the sphere of the various forms of Hindu Mysticism. I there defined mysticism as
a view or belief that the ultimate reality, whatever may be its nature, though unattain^
able by merely logical or speculative means, can finally be realised through feeling or
the development of the wilLprocess, character or the like. The force of this defini'
tion lies in the fact that the mystic does not think that the ultimate reality can be
attained merely through speculative philosophy or logic. He may believe in the
fruitfulness of philosophy and he need not be anti^metaphysical. But though he
may be willing to believe that philosophy is useful for the comprehension of the
ultimate reality, he does not admit that philosophy alone can lead us to that goal.
However great the philosophy may be, it must be supplemented by faith, emotion
or the severe discipline of the functions of the will. As such one must distinguish
between reason and higher conviction. We know that reason ordinarily leads to
rational conviction. We believe what we find reasonable and such a belief is ameri'
able to all the pragmatic tests. If I believe that the Chittagong Mail leaves Calcutt a
at 7 in the morning and if I am in need of catching that train, the belief would signify
that under the circumstances I should start sufficiently early and take all due precau¬
tions that I may entrain myself before that time. Such a conviction naturally
proceeds from a belief founded on reason. But there is a higher kind of conviction
which proceeds not only from the satisfaction of reason but from the satisfaction of
the person as a whole including his emotional and volitional selves. A person in this
sense may be understood to mean the entity that is formed by the fusion as it were
of the rational, emotional and volitional selves. The conviction that finds expression
from this concrete person is naturally different from a merely intellectual decision or
judgment, inasmuch as it involves the participation of the entire person in the con¬
viction which is absent in the other case. When a man treads on the ground of
traditional notions grounded on custom, popular religious beliefs, myths, wise sayings
or the like, or when he merely argues in favour of a favourite proposition of his, it is
his logical or historical faculty that he exercises and it may not in the least touch his
concrete personality. Though in poetry as in every other work of art the artistic
emotion may be regarded as an indispensable condition, yet there is an immense
difference in the attitude of the artistic creation in accordance with the way in which
the creator expresses himself in his creation. Thus when the poet is intoxicated
with the joy of any particular piece of nature’s beauty, say the evening landscape,
a beautiful flower or the like, he may manifest his joy of this direct intuitive contact

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

with nature or he may record his sympathy with the various aspects o£ the suffering
humanity and present his distress in such universal forms that it at once touches the
heart; we find therein the testimony of the poet’s great humanity. But apart from
this there may be occasions on which the poet not only reveals the particular tendency
or temperament of his own but he seems also to record the deepest experiences of his
own inner nature in which the various psychical, emotional or volitional functions of
his self have melted away, as it were, into one whole. Such an experience is no
longer temperamental and it cannot be said to be the expression of any particular part
of the poet’s nature, for here it is the integrated whole of the poet's personality that
finds expression.

It is in this sense that we can speak of Tagore’s mysticism in poetry
as being the manifestation of his personality as expressed in his conviction of his
place in the universe in relation to his fellow beings and to nature. It is no place
here to illustrate it with copious quotations from his poems, songs and reflective prose
compositions, but I may only indicate on very broad general lines the main character¬
istics of his mystic conviction. I call it mystic, because he has not formulated it as
a result of logical speculation but it has come upon him in poetic enlightenment as
it were through the insight of a seer. In his autobiographical sketch he refers to one
fine morning when the sun shone before the tree tops and the houses before him and
brought with it a new message which cleared away the darkness and delusion in
which he was groping so long. He feels throughout all his mystic writings that
man is but a part of the universe as a whole. He is related in an intimate connection
with all other things in the world, be they however trifling; it is only because we
take ourselves and our spheres of activities and ideals to be detached from other things,
that we set up ourselves against them, and meet with a conflict. Our sense of misery
and fear arises from the false individuality which centres itself in a delusive manner
in our smaller interests and narrower ranges and thus feels the burden and crush of
the mighty whole against it. If, on the other hand, we could broaden ourselves to
see that we were like waves in a big ocean and that we had no separate existence
apart from it, we should never feel ourselves to be lost and suffering will lose all its
meaning. Suffering and privation, death and sorrow, can have place only so long
as we raise our walls around ourselves and thereby obstruct the open air of the
universe as a whole. The dynamic principle that runs through us is the same that
runs through the universe and it unites us with it. What appears to be death is but
a momentary disappearance which is to be revived again in another form. It is
merely a game of hide and seek which can never mystify the wise man who knows
how to look to himself and beyond. Egotism, pride and vanity can only appear
when we move round our own orbits and refuse to believe that our real orbits are not
around ourselves in our narrow circles but on the widest line which goes round us all.
Our truth consists in the reality of that whole of which we are individual consti¬
tuents. This does not mean the sacrifice of our individuality or personality but it

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

merely means that our true personality or individuality, when properly interpreted,
seems to extend further and further, wider and wider, until it permeates through all
things in the world and loses itself in the infinite completeness of the whole. A
true insight into our own personality reveals to us that it is infinite in its nature and
cannot therefore be circumscribed to that form of it which is only apparent to us at
the moment. Our true individuality is thus our cosmic personality through which
alone our individual functions, interests, ideals and freedom of being should find their
ultimate satisfaction. We realise the fact that the true logical, emotional and dynamic
scope of such a personality gradually leads itself forward until it traverses the path
of its self'development and completes the mystic circle that envelopes us all. Looked
at from this point of view, all that may appear unaccomplished in this life, all that
may appear as failures, is but only a sign that we have stopped in the mid-way and
and have not taken into consideration our life’s journey as a whole. For such a
journey is not limited to this brief span of 6o, 8o or loo years, but it goes through
eternity and in the eternal ideal completion of our life, all that has failed and
all that has not yet come to pass, are already fully realised. He illustrates
this idea in the dancing of the seasons in which the shivering, pale and languid
winter changes its decrepit form into the rejuvenated, smiling and buoyant image
of the spring. His religion of “no fear” goes for the conviction that, in spite of
death and disease which constantly stare us in the face, from which the Buddha
sought his relief in his wisdom of the doctrine of phenomenalism and momentarism
and from which the Upanishads sought relief in their emphasis on the ultimate
reality as pure consciousness, which was developed in the hands of their commen¬
tators as being a retirement from the domain of Maya, we have no reason to fear
when we know things in their proper perspective, in which the being of every
entity is commingled in its indefinite expansion with the being of every other entity,
and the chasm of death is thus merely a plunge in the Ganges of rejuvenation. The
chasm of death only obstructs our view for the moment and our sorrow is due to our
foolish refusal to see and believe what comes next but what is not at the moment.

Side by side with this notion of a true individuality in which the being of
every entity is commingled in its onward march of progress with the being of every
other entity which thus smacks of pantheism in its conception of a whole, there is
another vein of thought in which he seems to review the world-process in terms of
the self'realising dance of the creative spirit.

Thus in his musical opera Rituranga he conceives that the spirit reveals itself
in external nature in all its beautiful plumage of colour in the flying procession of the
seasons which come and go and also in the mental forms which catch their flowing
images.

Life and consciousness in man have an expansive existence which goes far
beyond him and embraces life in all forms. In the inner region of man there is a
continuous play of thoughts, ideas and emotions and in the outer world of nature

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

there is a play or dance of heat and light, sun-shine and rain, leaves and flowers as
manifested in the seasonal variations. In his mystic vision Rabindranath deeply
feels that God is always approaching us in the various phenomena of nature, in the
heat of summer, in the rains of the monsoon, in the corn-fields and sun-shine of
autumn, through the shivering cold of winter and the rejuvenating touch of spring.
Numerous songs of the poet testify to the feeling of communion with God through
the various occurrences of nature. We also find that the poet feels himself to be
like a toy or a musical instrument in the hand of God and all his poetical effusions
are supposed to rush out from some perennial source of inspiration of a creative
energy which is far beyond the control or touch of the man Rabindranath. It is
this creative energy that uses the lips of the poet as its mouthpiece and reveals itself
through him. In our appreciation and appraisement of art we come in touch with
the surplus man which is entirely different from the economical or the practical man
and it is this surplus man that constitutes the immortality and the infinitude of
man, and it is this man that is the greatest Brahman in which all divisions, finitude
and limitations are lost and in which we are all united. The mysticism of
Rabindranath thus consists in the conviction of his personality, of his true relation
with the higher man in himself, its place in the world of events and nature, and in
the final fulfilment of the destiny of man, in the totality of the whole from which
we can never be thrown away. Such a conviction must be distinguished from a
mere intellectual notion which proceeds from logical judgment or from a mere emo¬
tional outburst of poetical fancy. It must proceed directly from out of the creative
flow of the personality in which the diverse elements have all melted together into
a concrete reality, the expressions of which must necessarily be something universal
and infinite, far above the smallness of the economical or practical man.

SANSKRIT COLLEGE, S. N. DAS GUPTA

CALCUTTA

TAGORE—THE PACIFIST

‘Sprinkle the world with the water of Everlasting Life,

Thou who art the fountain of Peace, of Welfare, of Holiness, of Love.’

W ITH this solemn hymn to Lord Buddha, sung in the Waisakha Celebration,
Rabindranath Tagore sends all over the world the eternal message of
India. Peace is the key-note of Hindu history and Peace and Fraternity
are the greatest contributions of India to Humanity. Naturally the Poet Laureate
oi Asia, amidst the sunset'glow of his genius, is harping on that eternal theme to
reclaim the benighted human beings from hatred and cruelty to sacrifice and love.
The world has deservedly crowned him as the greatest living poet of the present age
and one of the greatest of any age, but very few realize as yet that his silent and
often unnoticed labour in the cause of World Peace, is one of his greatest titles to
immortality. Poets will come and poets will go, but very few of the creative artists
of the world would show this unique record of Tagore, as a spinner of the golden
dream of Maitri, fellowship, making the whole world kin, silently removing the
apparently irremovable barriers between nation and nation. Through his pro-
phetic messages and passionate poems men and women all over the world have felt
that they belong to one family; and that is the greatest miracle which Rabindranath
has worked in this age darkened by selfishness and savagery. May the blessings of
all beings be on his noble life and may victory attend on his dreams, illumining the
Future of Mankind I

THE MAHA BODHI SOCIETY

SRI DEVAMITRA DHARMAPALA

THE GREAT UTOPIAN

U NTIL we connect the spiritual life with the political and the political with
the spiritual, both will remain paralysed. That is the riddle the sphinx
sets to man, age after age; and civilization after civilization is devoured for
inability to answer it. We are still waiting for our Oedipus ; and we shall never
find him by denying that the enigma exists. By nothing but by liberty can the
problem be solved; and until it is solved, always, generation after generation, the
prophets will rise like the Phoenix from the ashes of despair.

‘Alas, alas!

Thou hast smitten the v/orld.

Thou hast laid it low.

Shattered, o’erthrown.

Into nothingness hurled
Crushed by a demigod’s blow!

We bear them away.

The shards of the world.

We sing well-a^day

Over the loveliness gone.

Over the beauty slain.

Build it again.

Great child of the Earth,

Build it again

With a finer worth.

In thine own bosom build it on high!

Take up thy life once more:

Run the race again!

High and clear
Let a lovelier strain

Ring out than ever before!’—(Faust).

CAMBRIDGE G. LOWES DICKINSON

THE PROCESS

That which was crooked straightened

That v/hich was defeated

Joined with that which was victorious

And that which was beautiful

Blended

With that which was ill planned
To be separated
And made crooked
Or straight again.

NEW YORK THEODORE DREISER

INDIA AND AFRICA

T he great branches of the human family which have their chief dwelling place
in Africa and India have much of common history in the past and common
interest in the present.

The thing that India and Africa must learn to-day is that their interests
have more in common than the interests of either have with the ideals of modern
Europe. Granted that Europe is powerful and still dominant, yet she is to-day
doomed. She has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. On the other
hand, the dark millions of India and Africa and their descendants and kinsmen
throughout the world, have upon their shoulders the vast responsibilities of re-making
this world nearer to the ideals of true civilization and high culture.

Two things they forgot in the past and this forgetting gave Europe its chance.
These things were:

The mastery of the technique of earning a living by subjugating the physical
forces of the world. And the other thing was the faith in democracy; that is, the
fact that out of the masses of people can be developed just as much power and
genius, ability and culture as has in the past been shown by the aristocracy, by the
favoured few. Africa and Asia did not know or did not realise these facts in the
past and their contributions to civilization were marred by poverty and slavery, on
the one hand ; and tyranny on the other. Europe has given us the technique of
industry. At terrible cost, to be sure, but nevertheless, the machine stands and is a
marvellous tool but a horrible master, Europe and America have given us the
beginnings of democracy, although with strange inconsistency they have tried to hem
democracy in with a colour bar.

Here, then, is our chance for the future—our mighty opportunity. We
borrow, as we have a right to borrow, and as Europe in other ages has borrowed
from us,—the things that in modern days she has taught us. But we use these
things for greater ends. Both Africans and Indians must seek to be rid of the
spiritual and physical death of poverty. They must educate and develop the masses
of their people. They must welcome genius and ability wherever it occurs,—among
the lowest and most unlikely, as well as among those who have regarded themselves
as the highest. It will be a revelation to see how wide-spread human ability is when
it has a chance. And then, with the help and strength which decent income gives,
and with the rise of the intelligent mass, the dark millions of Africa and India can
go forward to set new standards of freedom, equality and brotherhood for a world
which is in desperate need of these spiritual things.

It seems to me that no one has had a finer vision of such a future than
Rabindranath Tagore. I greet him in his quest for common justice for all men.

W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS

Gurudeva, Revered Master,

If we may call you by this name so dear to your pupils, who express through it
their consciousness that you are not only a poet and a teacher, but one of the voices
of divinity itself, we thank you for coming to us, across so many dreary seas, to help
to break down the barriers between the East and the West, so that, while India takes
from us those inventions which would destroy all poverty if they were well controiled,
we may learn from her something of her tolerant wisdom and her spiritual peace.
We see in you not merely the poet who, many years ago, won the highest recogni¬
tion of all nations, but the noblest symbol and representative of a people whose civi¬
lisation antedated the Pyramids, whose race was the mother of our races, and whose
language was the mother of our languages; whose village communities were the
source of our democracy, whose religions preached Christianity before Christ, whose
philosophers plumbed the depths of thought thousands of years ago, whose scientist
has won this year the most famous of all rewards, whose architecture is rivalled in
majesty only by that of Egypt, and in perfection only by that of Greece, whose arts
and industries were once the marvel and magnet of the v/orld. It is inconceivable
to us that a nation capable of producing, even in the bitterest poverty and destitu¬
tion, poets like yourself, scientists like Bose and Raman, and saints like Mahatma
Gandhi, should not soon be welcomed into the fellowship of self-governing peoples.

We offer you, as you go from us, our admiration and our affection. We feel
that we have been cleansed and ennobled by meeting you ; it gives us a new faith to
see that a man may still live a life true to all the highest ideals of our youth. We
were cynics before you came ; v/e thought that all ideals were false, and all hopes
vain ; but one look at you and we know that we were wrong, that the battle between
Right and Might is not yet lost, and that life may still have a meaning for us that
will not be frustrated by our deaths. Something of the ancient idealism of the East
has been poured into our blood by the wine and music of your verse, by the example
and majesty of your life,

NEW YORK WILL DURANT

A FRAGRANT MEMORY

I N September 1920, we had the joy c£ welcoming ‘the Poet’ to our home
in Holland.

Our house was on the coast of the Zuider Sea and we had a wide and
lovely view towards the setting sun. When I look back on the time the Poet spent
with us, two vivid memories stand forth in pure relief against the background of
many hours filled with joy. For that was for me the ground note of the whole
symphony; joy, creative joy, life-giving joy,—his love for nature, the sky, the wind,
the flowers. Often while he was with us I remembered the saying of One of the Great
Teachers of Mankind; “Except ye become as little children, ye enter not the
kingdom of Heaven,” I have felt him as one who gets nearest to the heart of man,
through the heart of Nature.

The first of the two vivid memories was when he entered our house. In the
hall he stood still, raised his head, closed his eyes and was quite silent—then he
bent his head as it were in greeting and moved on through the room ; and as he
passed a large bowl of red, living roses on the centre table, he let his fingers stray
over the roses tenderly, full of understanding and love and recognition. That
gesture revealed him to us as much as his poems.

The second memory is of an evening. A young gul sang some of his poems
put to western music. At that time we did not know that each of his songs had
music of its own, so we were ignorant of our very stupid attempt at entertaining
the much-to-be-pitied poet. There were also some songs of Schumann, which were
more appreciated. After the guests were gone, the poet sat in front of the fire, his
hands folded on his knees, staring into the fire. I asked him: “Master, will you
let us hear your own songs in your own words? May we take part in the life
which is expressed when you sing your Indian music?” Great silence! Down
in the hall the old Dutch clock ticked away time—the wood fell together in the
fire and sent out a fountain of sparks into the silence—we waited—then he lifted
his voice saying:

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

“This is the song we sing at sunset. We sit looking out over vast distances,
we sing of the sadness of human existence, also of the longing in our hearts for union
with God, we sing of the joy of our senses when we see the light, hear the songs,
smell all the delicate odours from the Mother^Earth when the sun sets. We sing of
the love in our hearts, not only the love of one man for one woman, but of the love
in the heart of humanity, the longing, the sadness, the pain and the joy of all the
world—that is our sunset song.” The poet's voice rose and soared to the flame-lit
rafters ; it sank and became flute-like and again swelled out in waves or took over
the shadows and pictures of the flames; hearing and seeing were merged into one
great experience; joy and sorrow came from one source deep in the heart of the
w'orld, and from the heights above ; time was not; the clock had lost its power of
being a messenger to us—we heard it not. We were lifted up and merged into
unity with Love and Compassion. That hour will live in our hearts as long as we
live.

There are two sayings which I want to bring before you as so very typical
of the poet’s vision on life. One was uttered when we had been talking about the
education of woman and of her place in life. The poet said: ‘Teach girls to
realise that their greatest influence is the personal contact with their surroundings
in the making of a home or in educating youth. Therefore they should be trained
to give out freely and pleasantly what they were taught. The atmosphere of
culture and light which is so created, is the centre of beautiful home life. Great
trouble should be taken to teach girls to express themselves in beautiful and simple
language, to give out their knowledge and experience, and their wisdom, their
thoughts, their dreams, their visions. The legends of the world are made eternal
through woman’s gift of story-telling. While man can express himself truly and
well in work and deeds, woman does so best of all through personal contact with
her surroundings. It is easier for children to learn through stories than through
books. And so a cultured and beautiful home influence can be theirs through the
gift of story-telling. The women who take care of the children of the world must
be story-tellers, and so set free the children’s own fantasy.’

The second saying was about a statue of Rodin’s, called ‘Protection,’ The
poet said: ‘In India we would feel protection to be more of a static force, like a bird
on the nest, or a Buddha sitting silent and full of inner peace ; you in the West are
too strenuous. Power is in stillness as much as in movement.’

I must stop writing about our well-beloved poet, but it is difficult. So many
W'onderful pictures pass before my inner vision.

NAARDEN, HOLLAND MARY VAN EEGHEN-BOISREVAIN

‘Free, henceforth, from doubts and desires which pass over it as water passes
over the leaf of the lotus without wetting it; acting, henceforth, only as acts
the potter’s wheel when the potter has ceased to turn it: “If I know that my
own body is not mine, and yet that the whole earth is mine, and again that it is
both mine and thine—no harm can happen then*’.’

LONDON HAVELOCK ELLIS

‘IN THIS HALL OF THINE I HAVE A CORNER SEAT’

“Do you know Tagore?’’ People have a way of asking when the talk drifts, as
it so often does, to India.

“Yes,’’ I find myself answering, “I have known Rabindranath Tagore many
years.’’

Yet do I? What do I mean when I say I know him? Somehow, on this
autumn Sunday, with the sunlight that shifts between the tall buildings growing
a little pale, and the tang of dead leaves beginning to drift across the memory—it
not through the gray, treeless, city streets—it seems very presuming to imagine that
one person can know another, much less a poet, who must surround himself with
silence so that he can hear his own voice singing to himself his own songs. Some'
thing of the outer shell we may come to know, but the whole man never. These
glimpses of Tagore, therefore, are set down here with the perfect realization of their
incompleteness.

It was neither in America nor in India, but in Japan, that I saw Tagore first,
nearly sixteen years ago. He had been invited to give a reading of his poems at
the Imperial University of Tokyo, and in a hall packed to overflowing with hundreds
of Japanese students I sat, eagerly awaiting the appearance of the winner of the
Nobel Prize for literature; for it was as such that the western intellectual world, and
Japan also, knew him at this time. In India, I have read, his songs v/ere sung by
peasants at work in the fields and by women drawing water at the well, long before
the world honoured him.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

When at last he stood before us, I felt that a prophet of the Old Testament
had suddenly put on living flesh. The silver white of his long hair and beard melted
into the white purity of his robe, and in the dark, aristocratic face the eyes burned
with consciousness of power. Then I forgot how he looked; for in a high, delicate
voice, the words following one another like a flight of wild birds across a sunset sky,
he began to chant poems from The Gardener and Gitanjali.

My next contact with him came five years later, in India. Like so many visitors
to India—one dreads to think how many—I, too, made a pilgrimage to Santiniketan.

I remember that it was the ‘hour of cowdust' when I arrived at the ‘Abode of
Peace,* the tim.e when all over India the herds of humped white cattle and of blue'
black water-buffaloes are returning to the thousands of villages. A room had been
made ready for me, the room the poet himself formerly occupied, I was told, though
now he was living in the upper storey of another of the small houses scattered about,
part of the school he had founded here at his ancestral home. The room gave me
odd pleasure. It was barely long enough for the cot which was its principal furnish¬
ing, and there was but a single window, yet its utter simplicity soothed—no clutter
of possessions, no superfluous ornaments, not even, if my memory records accurately,
a picture on the wall. But through the window the wide plain was visible, covered
with some unknown magenta-colored bloom, and peace was there, outside and in.

A simple meal was served in the tradition of Indian hospitality; my hostess,
Tagore’s daughter-in-law, herself brought the dishes and set them before me. Then,
when I had eaten, word came that the poet was ready to receive me. A teacher of
science at the school, not then in session, led the way to Tagore’s upper balcony.
This time it was not the poet I found at first, but the educator.

It was of his university that he wished to talk. Here it was, the concrete
expression of his vision of India’s need and of his tireless energy. It embodies the
spirit of the old forest universities of India—the students living in close association
with nature, not cut off in the sterile atmosphere of modern city life ; studying to grow
wise, not learned ,* seeking no official reward for education: in short, following the
old ideal of plain living and high thinking.

But in India toward the end of 1921 it would have been humanly impossible for
any talk to stay long away from the burning topics of the hour. Amritsar was still
painfully fresh in Tagore’s mind. He had relinquished his knighthood in protest
against what occurred there ; yet he deplored the type of nationalism which was then
sv/ceping across India. India was great in her own birthright; let her stand upon that
birthright, confident and unafraid, but not blind herself to the truth that, though
blood is thicker than water, without water there would be no blood. Always,
humanity first, the nation second.

As Tagore talked, the full moon rose and silvered the dark earth. It shed its
quiet radiance over the balcony and touched with new beauty the fine head of India’s
outstanding poet-philosopher etching it there vividly against the background of the

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Indian night. It was true that the land was torn by much bitterness, but harmony
was still worshipped in the heart of this faithful devotee.

It was my privilege, when Tagore came to New York last winter, to see some-
thing of him on a number of occasions. Two of these stand out above the others.
Most precious, perhaps, was the evening spent in talk of Indian village life. As
I entered the hotel room, he put down a copy of my Voiceless India, which he was
just reading. My eyes had been opened by a year in an Indian village, not only to
the pitiful economic struggle of the Indian peasants, but to their qualities of inner
strength, and their fortitude. This book of mine, with its picture of village life,
brought back to Tagore some of his own village experiences, which he recounted.
It did more: it made him homesick, he said.

The last time I saw him was on the eve of his final home-going. He had
moved to a friend's apartment, and here I found him, seated like a king, on a dais.
The dais, as it turned out, was merely an artist's model-stand, and the kingliness oI
pose was to be interpreted as an expression of nothing but kindness. Deftly the
sculptress smoothed her clay into a likeness. There was nov/ the serenity of a
northern winter in his face, something of the austere calm of snowy ranges, but the
deep-set eyes were, as ever, compellingly alive. In India, they say, builders of
temples always place seme stone awry, leave some bit of the structure symbolically
imperfect, since they know that whatever is finished in the realm of matter soon
goes to death. Is it not the eternal quest for perfection that gives meaning to life
and integrates all our varied activities? ‘O my bird, listen to me,' Tagore's eyes
seemed to say, in the words of one of his own poems, *do not close your wings!
The end of the quest is not yet.’

There was a stir, a sudden expectation, fitting the room. His secretary hurried
to his side and v.'hispered to him. Tagore arose and stepped down quickly from his
platform. Instinctively everybody present stood up ; for one had come to do him
honor, one whom the world acclaims as perhaps the greatest mind the West has
produced in three centuries—Albert Einstein.

What had the two men in common? As they sat together on a sofa, I felt the
differences between them ringing like overtones, enriching a fundamental harmony.
Tagore's gestures were restrained. Einstein’s were abrupt. Einstein was squarer,
stockier, more informal in his manner. His grey hair, brushed back from his fore¬
head, stood out around his head as if charged v/ith electricity. The fine mouth
smiled frequently. The heavy-lidded eyes often held a quizzical look.

It came to me that, though they travel by different roads, surely the end they
seek is one. The intangible bond linking these two great men from the East and
from the West is the bond of personal surrender to the timeless and the eternal.

NEW YORK GERTRUDE EMERSON

8 o

NAISHKARMYAM

How real the mother to the child, the beloved to the lover, wealth to its owner,
science to the scholar, beauty to the artist, one’s own self to every man.

Still, no reality that is worldly, even the dearest one, can claim the privilege of
becoming, sooner or later, a jot more than a dream.

To the thinker the thing that vanishes in ten or twenty or even one hundred
years is as unsubstantial and deceitful as that which lasts a twinkling of the eye.

Indeed, we are all like black vesper’s pageants: a cloud that is dragonish, a vapour
sometimes like a bear or a lion, a towered citadel, a pendent rock, a forked mountain,
or blue promontory with trees upon it, that nod unto the world and mock our eyes
with air. Indeed, time makes us all indistinct as water is in water.

The realisation of the cosmic vanity brings as a result one only possible watch'
word: renunciation, naishkarmyam.

But, is it possible, on the other hand, to concentrate life in the one vision of
trarisitoriness? Shall we say to the child t do not love thy mother for she is liable
to perishing? On account of transitoriness shall we stop the hand of the tiller in the
field, dissuade the genius from revealing new truths or forms of beauty?

Let not the great thought of impermanence, that leads the soul to God, resolve
itself in destruction, in sheer impossibility.

There must be renunciation, there must be action. In the reconciling of the two
terms the crown of life resides, and the seers of India, old and new, teach us how to
reconcile them. It is not action that ought to be renounced but the fruit of action,
and true naishkarmyam is attained to through complete unselfishness in our exertion.
As long as the thought of transitorincss makes us pause and ask: ‘What is the use
of acting?’ we may be sure that the ego has not been annihilated, that it is lurking
under one form or other. Truly disinterested action gives a sense of eternity and of
perpetual joy.

This is the doctrine, nay, the revelation of the Bhagavadgita, this is India’s lofty
message which triumphantly blends into a unity not only the incontrovertible truth
of the dreamy nature of life and the no less incontrovertible necessity of action, but
also the East sublimating itself in meditation and the West raising work to wonder.

Renunciation is good, action is good. The East is right, the West is right too.

That the world should know and love renunciation and action. East and West,
a poet, made of light and of music, sang and is still singing luminous and melodious
songs:

Rabindranath Tagore.

Let humanity bless him.

ROYAL ACADEMY, ROME CARLO FORMICHI

DANK AN RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Dein Wort bricht dem meincn Bahn,
Schlafendes beginnt zu wandern.
Wundersamer Drang hebt an,

Zieht mich machtig zu den andern.

Zieht mich hin zu alien Dingen,

Weil ein Strahl aus ihncn bricht,

Der wie innig'leises Singen
Trifft erschiitternd mein Gesicht.

Zieht mich zu den Menschen alien,
Denen ich bisher so fern,

Weil ein Durchblick wie kristallen
Dringt zu unsers Wesens Kern.

Zieht durch Zeiten und diirch Raume
Mich zur letzten Klarheit hin,

Off net jenseits aller Traume
Pforten zu dem tiefsten Sinn.

Innre Schonheit strahlt zur Stund
Aus der Schimmerglanz der Zahren.
Innre Einheit tut sich kund:

Sein ist bitter-siiss Gebaren.

Innrer Friede senkt sich ein
Ganz erwachendem Gemute.

Pochend Herz in alien Sein!

Lauter Freudel Lauter Giite!

MARBURG

HEINRICH FRICK

In the name of American Womanhood
great many more joyful and creative years.

send you love and heartfelt wishes for

PHILADELPHIA

ERNESTINE FITZMAURICE

AN OPEN LETTER TO TAGORE

D ear Poet and Honoured Teacher—^whom I am also happy and proud to call
Old Friend—-I welcome this opportunity of expressing, in company with so
many others, my heart'felt appreciation of your personality and of your life-
work, and of warmly participating in the good wishes you are now receiving from ail
sides. All these not only from your fellow-countrymen in Bengal, and over India,
but also from so many of us in other lands, who recognise in you their Laureate also,
and even the wide World’s; as this occasion will more fully help to make known.

Among these good wishes, we hope above all that despite all your difficulties,
from shaken health to manifold cares, you may be able to surmount these, throughout
active and productive years to come. It is encouraging and hopeful to us all, as I
trust to you, to recall how your brothers, whom we remember as also men of Wisdom,
reached its normal reward, of longevity, and up to its ever-ripening best. That
association and assurance—of wisdom towards its persistence for many days—is often
and admirably stated in the Wisdom Books of Israel of old. It is verifiable through¬
out observation and in biographies up to this day ; and it is also demonstrably justified
by biology and psychology, by medicine and hygiene in their current advance.

So thus while we wish long life to you, be encouraged to live it: thus with
your very best work before you, still to be accomplished, even perfected.

I pass however from your vast and varied contributions to literature, from its
natural base in folk-song to its highest levels, to that interest and activity in
Education, again at all levels, of which let me more fully speak. Your combination
of “plain living and high thinking,’’ in which India has throughout the ages given
the very foremost example to the world, has been with you most fully associated with
active participation in the highest cultural interests of other lands, and these in the
West as well as further East. Thus you have been helping forward the wide world,
and even more widely than you can know: though often before now you have had
many and cordial assurances of it. Yet though I know of your wide helpfulness,
and not only from my own son and his fellows, but widely over Europe, and indeed
from Japan to North and South America as well, I have realised the actual and the
coming values of your example and influence most clearly of all at Santiniketan itself;
with its boys and students, its teachers and professors and yourself, all starting their
days from sunrise appreciation of Nature in its beauty, to meditation upon Life,
towards its highest and best. Hence the fundamental preparation—as some of us
Westerners can confirm—for thoughtful and serious studies, and for better aiding of
them : so next for due professional preparation ; and this not only towards individual
proficiency, and even originality, but beyond aU to social service. Thus in method,
in principle, so in very essence, you have long been giving example of encouragement

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

towards that revitalisation of the school and university curriculum of Western type,
now too dominant, even in India. I have indeed high hope of our Indian College
here—which you have honoured at its outset by your acceptance of its presidency,
and which I trust you may be able some day to visit and thus re-inspire—that it
may pass on your educational example and its impulse to the incipient sister ^colleges
of our nascent “Cite Universitaire,” Scottish, British and American, Swiss, German
and Austrian, etc., and of course French as well: so hence again throughout the
Western universities from which we mostly come. There, too, we are studying
and striving to aid beyond their too dispersive specialisms, and towards synthesis;
and this through studies of Life, in Evolution;—Life both on its organic and its
social levels ; so in terms of Nature and Civilization ; and thus beyond the too simply
mechanistic presentments still so largely in power.

Primary education in Europe has had many pioneers, as from Rousseau,
Pestalozzi and Froebel to Montessori and now many more; and in secondary educa-
tion, too, notable advances are in later progress. But alas, our University Entrance
Examinations inhibit rather than aid the best work of teachers in their schools ; while
even in the Universities themselves, “exam and cram” too readily go on together.
Hence that “Parrot’s Training,” which you have so justly satirised, and reinforced
by your admirable illustrators. Let me beg you will re-publish this; and let your
publishers in all countries give it that widening circulation for which the public are
more ready than when you wrote it. Thus both universities and schools will profit
by it, even towards the increasing replacement of examinations, too much of memory
and routine, by estimation, or real attainments and powers, and of character
combining all these.

How such collaboration of East and West is needed towards vital studies, has
been sadly illustrated for me in this past month; in which two patriotic and well'
meaning Indian graduates in this country have sent me their manuscripts in hopes of
encouragement before publication, the subject of each being “Education for India.”
But, alas, in each case, they consider its needs in terms of our relatively greater
European literacy, that is of “thd three R’s” (Reading, ’Riting and ’Rithmetic). And
they alike insist that this be made compulsory, and that without delay! You can
imagine how uncongenial had to be my replies! What we in English call “the
Ministry of Education” is for the clearet'headcd French, but “the Department of
Public Instruction”—though still too much akin. In both countries happily however,
by the better members of the bureauaacy, by rural teachers and awakening urban
ones, it is at length becoming realised how such centralized drilling into the print'
habit, and the scribble'habit and the money-habit, now so predominant in the urban
mass-mind, and in that of its leaders, with their verbalistic empaperment and their
pecuniary obsession accordingly, are deleterious, indeed often destructive, to the rural
mind, and thus to village life ; even leading to its growing depopulation, with deterio¬
ration of what remains. What you can see of this too much beginning in India, is

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

now far surpassed in France, throughout its 40,000 villages; while as you know our
Scottish and English rural life has been depressed, sucked wellmigh dry, when not
even devoured by our great towns. Yet the remedy is also plainly within our reach,
and even its application ; that of "the New Education" (real and ancient)—of ‘‘the
three H’s”—Heart, Hand and Head. From these all that any can require and use
of reading, writing and arithmetic, speedily "explode" into clearness and power, as
Madame Montessori has so well proved, and as many others as well as myself have
clearly verified in practice; hence without those wasted years of weary drudgery,
which the dominant mis'instruction system compels, and leaving the mind ready and
keen for all that Song, Literature and Drama, and Science too, have to offer. And
this plainly, from your remotest Bengal villages to those of our Scottish Highlands
and Hebrides, hence alike vitally and spiritually rich ; despite that material po\'erty
which such villages too similarly share.

I have learned much too from your professional courses, as notably from AgricuL
ture to Painting; so again I have to congratulate and thank you. For though our
\Vestern schools of these, here and elsewhere, are more largely equipped and attended,
more developed and specialised than are yours, you have not only potently aroused
the noble idealism of the Bengal School of Painting (even before discovering the
original painter in yourself!) as well as by setting a true artist to inspire his pupjls in
your College. In Agriculture you have shown example to all our Western colleges,
in turning your students to advancing village practice in ever^widening circles, year
by year.

Even beyond Literature, and Education too, we rejoice in your widening moral
influence; this again, not only in India, but literally from "China to Peru." Yet
the world needs your further impulse,—and so is ready for it; since now in
all lands becoming awakened, through recent and impending crises, of late years
extending to all countries, until now so gravely threatening each of our own.
These crises are not "simply financial," nor even of unemployment, as London
mostly too simply thinks; nor even political, as many also do. For all these stresses
and strains are but so many conspicuous symptoms, though each dangerous enough,
of far deeper change; nothing short of the decadence, even towards breakdown, of
our Industrial Age ; with its too prolonged subordination of Men to the Machine ; and
of both to Money, now also failing him. Yet much as in our European fifteenth
century, while the Medieval World was breaking down, the Renaissance was arising.
In turn, it declined, giving place to this Industrial, Commercial and Mechanical Age;
with its rival political economies as its contending faith. Individualist and Socialist,
Bolshevist and Fascist; and with the "Struggle for Existence" as its general doctrine
for all concerned, from individuals to parties, and to States, as in fact its prevalent
philosophy. No wonder then that all this should be in decadence! Hence you
and I, and others, increasingly remain outside the political struggles of the present;
not from apathy, but for our best work, that of aiding the better social order now

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

also at many points in germination and growth, and tov/ards its future foliage and
flower, its fruit, and seed beyond. Yet how shall we make this nascent age, of
Revivance, clearer to ourselves and others? “Where no vision is, the people perish.”
Your vision has been clear as was Ruskin’s, and happily more gently stated and practi¬
cally applied, that “there is no wealth but Lifel” If so, in the subordination of
mechanism to Life lies the secret; as Denmark and other small countries have been
seeing and practising, so much better than “the Great Powers.” You doubtless know
your nearest analogue, alike as ruralist and poet, A.E. (George Russell of Dublin), one
of the very foremost of Western re-educators, though still in the day of small things.
Though none can wholly escape the pressure of the struggle for existence, its present
pains are also birth-struggles, those of the new and better order. This Social
Revivance is destined increasingly to supersede the prevalent mechanistic and
mammonistic age, with its everthreatening international and civil wars by turns,
each worse than before. How so? By the discernment of Life, in Evolution ; so
long perverted, and misunderstood, as mere Struggle for Existence—but now
increasingly discernible, as in past ages at their best, as to and through the Culture
of Existence. Those immersed in prevalent illusions, as of conflict on all levels, find
it hard to see this; for one these mechanistic and mammonistic thought-levels, the
practice and even the scientific theory of Struggle have seemed alike clear and con¬
vincing. But as we are now passing from the long domination of physical science
during the Industrial Age towards the discernment of the processes of life and mind,
and even of society and morals, so “we speak what we do know, and testify what
we have seen”—the beginning of a new period and phase of civilization, a veritable
Revivance.

How can we verify this in direct observation? and next in terms of these later
sciences and their application? For observation I have seen your own vital sowing
and then growings at Santiniketan ; and I can show at least something of the like
when you or your students come to Montpellier, or to our Outlook Tower at Edin¬
burgh, or to our kindred and other centres in London itself. Yet even great scale
illustrations are not lacking, as conspicuously that of Krupp, who, until November
1918, was the most terrible of efficient munition-makers ; yet since Peace was dictated
by the victors, has not been allowed to make a single weapon. So now he has
literally turned sword to plough-share. He has been redeeming the equivalent of
a new and fertile little Denmark from the heaths and wastes of Germany; and with
such prosperity that he is building more garden villages for his own many workers
than before. So, in common sanity, apart from pacifist sentiment, other countries
can learn thus to realise, beyond our present “peace” (too little better than War-Truce,
from mere fears) the possibilities of the needed Peace-war, of constructive Help-will,
inspired by renewing Hope. At this critical time too, the old conceptions of
Nationalism and Imperialism are giving way with us as in other lands; and towards
better ones Regional, from small scale to great. International, and even Mondial.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Here again you have been at once an example at home in Bengal, thence increasingly
to India, and throughout the, World. With the change of the Industrial Age on the
one side towards breakdown, yet on the other towards an age of Revivance, the like
is becoming even plainer in Politics, on one side intensifying to crises, yet on the
other hand to beginning of further and more advanced changes, beyond all schools of
politics. Imperialistic and Nationalistic alike and even beyond the often useful
endeavours of the League of Nations itself.

Yet as we all begun with appreciation of you as our foremost Poet, so let me
close. With your keen and sympathetic ear, you have appreciated the best of
English poetry, and enriched it with your own voice. As our old friend, Jagadis
Bose, with his subtle brain and skilful hand, has been a “cutting edge” in European
science-progress, yet all the more because fundamentally Indian too, so we of the
West have all the more welcomed you among our poets, because your mastery of our
tongue has been enriched from the spirit and the rhythming of your own home-
singing. So now my final word.

Among our poets, let me recall our last Laureate, Robert Bridges ,* and above
all for his well-named “Testament of Beauty” ; his bequest ere he passed away at
the ripe and happy old age we hope for you. Your works so far have surpassed his
before that one; yet let us plead that you consider his final example, and prepare
for the world your “Testament” in turn. You also have long been seeking and
finding, discerning and expressing, the Beautiful, the True, the Good; and so what
man now living can so fitly and so fully concentrate his powers towards such final
and consummate poem as that of their presentment anew? Does not your greatest
work thus lie before you? Its full design, its high purpose and resolve, will give
you new strength, and length of days for its achievement.

Yours ever,

THE INDIAN COLLEGE PATRICK GEDDES

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MONTPELLIER,

FRANCE

Very hearty Good Wishes to Rabindranath Tagore on his Seventieth Birthday.

LONDON

JOHN GALSWORTHY

R abindranath Tagore ne comptait encore, en Angleterre meme, que de
tres rates lecteurs, lorsque en 1912, je traduisis son Gitanjali. L'incom''
parable purete poetique de ce petit livre rayonnait a mes yeux d’un tel eclat
que je tien a honneur d’en apportor un reflet a la France. A travers la guerre, au
dessus de toutes nos dissensions politiques ou confessionnelles cette etoile fixe a
continue de luire et de verser sur le monde une tranquille lumiere d'amour, de
confiance et de paix. Je suis heureux d'apportcr aujourd'hui mon tribut d’hommage
et de reconnaissance a la grande figure que vous vous proposcz d’honorer.

PARIS ANDRfi GIDE

■V ’

ON TAGORE

1 .

UHKHABHISAR" by Rabindranath Tagore is one o£ those poems in which the
1 —/ peculiar inimitable quality o£ our greatest lyric poet comes out with supreme
£orce, beauty and sweetness. Rabindranath has a legion o£ imitators and many
have been very success£ul in catching up his less valuable mannerisms o£ style and
verse, as is the manner o£ imitators all the world over. But the poignant sweetness,
passion and spiritual depth and mystery o£ a poem like this, the haunting cadences
subtle with ai subtlety which is not o£ technique but o£ the soul, and the honey'laden
£eiicity o£ expression, these are the essential Rabindranath and cannot be imitated,
because they are things o£ the spirit and one must have the same sweetness and depth
of soul before one can hope to catch any of these desirable qualities. We emphasise
this inimitableness because the legion of imitators we mention are doing harm to the
progress of our poetry as well as to the reputation of their model and would suggest
to them to study this poem and realise the folly of their persistent attempt. One of
the most remarkable peculiarities of Rabindranath’s genius is the happiness and
originality with which he has absorbed the whole spirit of Vaishnava poetry and
turned it into something essentially the same and yet new and modern. He has given
the old sweet spirit of emotional and passionate religion an expression of more delicate
and complex richness voiceful of subtler and more penetratingly spiritual shades of
feeling than the deep-hearted but simple early age of Bengal could know. The old
Vaishnav bhava —there is no English word for it,—was easily seizable, broad and
strong. The bhava of these poems is not translatable in any other language
than that the poet has used,—a striking proof is the unsatisfactory attempt of the
poet himself, to explain in prose his own poem. Sonar Tart, But while the intel¬
lect tries in vain to find other intellectual symbols for the poet’s meaning, the poetry
seizes on the heart and convinces the imagination. These poems are of the essence
of poetry and refuse to be rendered in any prose; equivalent poetry is not created
from the intellect or the outer imagination, but comes from a deeper source within
to which men have no means of access except when the divine part within seizes
on the brain and makes it a passive instrument for utterance the full meaning of
which the brain is unable at the moment to grasp. This is the divine mania and
enthusiasm which the subtle spiritual discernment of Plato discovered to be the
real meaning of what we call inspiration. And of this unattainable force the best
lyrics of Rabindranath are full to overflowing.

II.

The first condition of the complete emergence of this new poetic inspiration
and this vaster and deeper significance of poetic speech must be the completion of

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

an as yet only initial spiritualised turn o£ our general human feeling and intelligence.
At present the human mind is occupied in passing the borders of two kingdoms. It
is emerging out of a. period of active and mostly materialistic intellectualism towards
a primary intuitive seeking to v/hich the straining of the intellect after truth has
been brought in' the very drive of its own impulse by a sort of slipping over un¬
expected borders. There is therefore an uncertain groping in many directions,
some of which are only valuable as transitional effort and, if they could be the end
and final movement, might lead only to a brilliant corruption and decadence. There
is vitalistic intuitivism, sometimes taking a more subjective, sometimes a more
objective form, that lingers amid dubious lights on the border and cannot get
through its own rather thick and often violent lustres and colours to finer and
truer spiritual vision. There is an emotional and sensational psychical intuitivism
half emerging from and half entangled in the vitalistic motive, that has often a
strange beauty and brilliance, sometimes stained with morbid hues, sometimes
floating in a vague mist, sometimes (and this is a common tendency) strained to an
exaggeration of half vital, half psychic motive. There is a purer and more delicate
psychic intuition with a spiritual issue, that which has been brought by the Irish
poets into English literature. The poetry of Whitman and his successors has been
that of life, but of life broadened, raised and illumined by a strong intellectual
intuition of the self of man and the large soul of humanity. And, at the subtlest
elevation of all that has yet been reached, stands or rather wings and floats in a high
intermediate region the poetry of Tagore, not in the complete spiritual light, but
amid an air shot with its seekings and glimpses, a sight and cadence found in a
psycho-spiritual heaven of subtle and delicate soul-experience transmuting the earth
tones by the touch of its radiance. The wide success and appeal of his poetry is
indeed one of the most significant signs of the tendency of the mind of the age.
At the same time one feels that none of these things are at all the whole of what
we are seeking or the definite outcome and issue. That can only be assured when
a supreme light of the spirit, a perfect joy and satisfaction of the subtlety and com¬
plexity of a finer psychic experience and a wide strength and amplitude of the life-
soul sure of the earth and open to the heavens have met, found each other and
fused together in the sovereign unity of some great poetic discovery and utterance.

III.

The most considerable representatives of this new and free form of poetic
rhythm are English and American, Carpenter and Whitman. Tagore’s translation
of his lyrics have come in as a powerful adventitious aid, but are not really to the
point in the question at issue; for these translations are nothing but a rhythmically
poetic prose and that kind of writing, cadenced prose poetry, a well recognised
form, cannot and does not try to compete with the established principle of measure;
it is an indulgence, a minor variation which has yet its definite place and serves

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

certain purposes which could not otherwise be fulfilled with any adequacy. It is
perhaps the only method for the work Tagore intends, a poetic translation of poetry
reproductive of the exact thought and spiritual intention of the original ,* for a
version in the fixed measures of another language not only substitutes another mould
[or the original movement, but by the substitution gives it almost another soul, so
powerful, distinct and creative a thing is poetic rhythm ; but the more flexible, less
insistent cadence of poetic prose does not so seize on and recast the spirit of the
original movement; it may even give a far-off minimised shadow, echo, illusion of
it, if the same or a similar spirit is at work; it can never have the same power, but
it may have some echo of a similar suggestion. When for instance Tagore writes
in English:

“Thou settest a barrier in thine own being and Thou callest thy severed
self in myriad notes. This thy self-separation has taken body in me. The
great pageant of thee and me has overspread the sky. With the tune of thee
and me all the air is vibrant, and all ages pass with the hiding and seeking
of thee and me.”

we have a very beautiful delicately cadenced poetic prose and nothing more.
Tagore is what some of the French writers of vers libre and Whitman and Carpenter
are not, a delicate and subtle craftsman, and he has done his work with a perfect
grace and spiritual fineness; but there is no attempt to do anything more than the
work just in hand, no intention of displacing the old way of poetry, in which he
has done in his own language such wonderful things, by a new principle of poetic
movement. If there were any such intention, it would have to be pronounced a
failure. One has only to compare this English prose, beautiful as it is, with the
original poetry to see how much has gone out with the change ; something is
successfully substituted which may satisfy the English reader, but can never satisfy
the ear or the mind that has once listened to the singer’s own native and magical
melodies. And this is so, even though the intellectual substance, the intellectual
precision and distinctness of the thought arc often more effective, carry home more
quickly in the translation, because in the original the intellectual element, the
tliought limits are being constantly overborne and are sometimes almost swallowed
UD by the waves of suggestion that come stealing in with the music; so much more
is heard than is said that the soul listening goes floating into that infinity and
counts the definite contribution of the intelligence as of a lesser value. Precisely
there lies the greatest power of poetic rhythm for the very highest work that the
new age has to do, and that it can be done by a new use of the poetic method
witiiout breaking the whole form of poetry, Tagore’s own lyrical work in his
mother tongue is the best evidence.

IV.

The spirit gives us not only a greater light of truth and vision, but the breath
of a greater living ; for the spirit is not only the self of our consciousness and

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

knowledge, but the larger self of life. To find our self and the self of things is not
to go through a rarefied ether of thought into Nirvana, but to discover the whole
greatest integral power of our complete existence.

This need is the sufficient reason for attaching the greatest importance to those
poets in whom there is the double seeking of this twofold power, the truth of
things and the insistence of life. All the most significant and vital work in recent
poetry has borne this stamp ; the rest is of the hour but this is of the future. It is
the highest note of Whitman, in him, as in one who seeks and sees much but has
not fully found, it widens the sweep of a great pioneer poetry but is an opening
of a new view rather than a living in its accomplished fullness. It is constantly
repeated from the spiritual side in all A. E’s work, moves between earth and the
life of the worlds behind in Yeats’ subtle rhythmic voices of vision and beauty,
echoes with a large fullness in Carpenter. The poetry of Tagore owes its sudden
and universal success to this advantage that he gives us more of this discovery and
fusion for which the mind of our age is in quest than any other creative writer of
the time. His work is a constant music of the overpassing of the borders, a chant-
filled realm in which the subtle sounds and lights of the truth of the spirit give new
meanings to the finer subtleties of life. The objection has been made that this
poetry is too subtle and remote and goes away from the broad near, present and
vital actualities of existence. Yeats is considered by some a poet of Celtic romance
and nothing more, Tagore accused in his own country of an unsubstantial poetic philo¬
sophising, a lack of actuality, of reality of touch and force of vital insistence. But
this is to mistake the work of this poetry and to mistake too in a great measure the
sense of life as it must reveal itself to the greatening mind of humanity now that
mind is growing in world-knowledge and towards self-knowledge. These poets
have not indeed done all that has to be done or given the complete poetic synthesis
and fusion. Their work has been to create a new and deeper manner of seeing
life, to build bridges of visioned light and rhythm between the infinite and eternal
and the mind and soul and life of man. The future poetry has not to stay in
their achievement; it has yet to step from these first fields into new and yet greater
ranges, to fathom all the depths yet unplumbed, to complete what has been left half
done or not yet done, to bring all it can of the power of man’s greater self and the
universal spirit into a broadened and even the broadest possible all of life. That
cannot and will not be achieved in its fullness all at once; but to make a foundation
of this new infinite range of poetic vision and creation is work enough to give
greatness to a whole age.

PONDICHERRY AUROBINDO GHOSH

A RABINDRANATH TAGORE

(En hommage, avec toute Vhumilite et la joie de mon coeurl)

Aux levies du maitre
la bonte souriante
fleurit;

et chante,

en paroles aimantes,
sa claire sagesse humaine.

La plaine, au soir lunaire,
est fluide ;

et languide, la riviere
frale le silence nocturne.

Urne mysterieuse.

Tame du maitre
brule

les parfums secrets
et precieux des idees.

Tel un vol de colombes blanches
que balance les nuees ;
la pensee
monte et s’exalte

au rythme delicat des periodes dorees.

BRUXELLES O. P. GILBER 7

AN RABINDRANATH TAGORE

D ICHTER und Philosoph der durch sein Lebenswerk die tiefsinnige und erhabene
indische Philosophic und Dichtkunst weiten Kreisen der iibrigen Welt
erschlossen hat, entbietet der Unterzeichnete, im Bewusstsein der innerlichen
engen Verbundenheit deutschen und indischen Geisteslebens, die ehrerbietigsten
Glueckwiinsche zum ciebzigsten Geburtstage. Mbge es dem hochverehrten Jubilar
vergbnnt sein, noch viele Jahre hindurch in ungebrochener Schaffenskraft seine
segcnsreiche Tatigkeit im Dienste der Mitwelt fortzusetzen nach den hehren Worten
der Bhagavad Gita “im Mittelpunkt des Herzens einsam wohnend, von wo in Liebe
er das All betrachtet.”

HEiDELBURG EMIL GOTSCHLICH

INDIA’S CONTRIBUTION TO WORLD THOUGHT,

I welcome this opportunity, furnished to me by the editor of the Golden Book
of Tagore, to make my contribution to that Memorial Volume on the comple¬
tion of the seventieth year by the Poet-Philosopher of India. I wish I could
write something about the Poet himself, but my knowledge of him is limited and
derived from his works ; for I have never had the good fortune of meeting him. But
all the same, it does not preclude me from realizing his greatness and the value of his
contribution to world thought.

The Indian mind has for generations been essentially a religious mind. Its
thoughts are enveloped in the mysticism of its faith, its ideas circumscribed by the
confines of its dogmas. History records several notable examples of break-aways from
this system. The first, the greatest and the noblest example of them all is that of
Gautama Buddha, the World Master of Thought and Philosophy. He was the first
notable Indian to depart from the surrounding creed and social order and create for
the people of his land the re-invigorating atmosphere of free thought and rational
living. The history of that great world movement is forgotten in the clamorous
claims of the lesser Lares and Penates for popular tribute. But in the academy, though
not in the market-place, the sublime contribution of this greatest of thinkers is well
recognized. For it is he who was the first to break down the galling barriers of caste,
it was he who established the unity of all life, the equality of all men including women,
and the redemption of man from the thraldom of priestcraft.

The poet, Rabindranath Tagore, belongs to the same family of political, religious,
social and literary free-lances. His writings breathe, not the musty fumes of the
lamp, but the green aroma of the corn fields. Unlike many a Hindu poet, he has
not confined his poetry to describing the imaginary exploits of the great heroes of
Hindu legend like Sri Ramachandra and Sri Krishna; but he has followed the lead,
if I may be permitted to say so, of the great humanist poets of the West for whom
humanity counts and of which they are the heralds and the symbols.

Except in Bengal, where he was fully appreciated by those whose appreciation is
worth having, Rabindranath Tagore had worked unhonoured and unsung for many
a year till he attracted the admiring gaze of a distant band of literary critics who placed
round his head the laurel wreath of the Nobel prize. The Government, ever tardy
to recognize merit, woke up to its obligations and conferred upon him its own tribute
of knighthood. Poets and philosophers do not work for the applause of men; they
work because they must. The inner fire within them burns too strong and must find
an escape, even though its light perish unseen by the habitues of the Court or of the
ball room. True poetry and true art can only be developed in such free and unfettered
atmosphere, which Rabindranath has created for himself. His school at Santiniketan

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

is truly an Abode of ,Peace. It conforms to the ancient ideal of a University of which
Nalanda and Taxila are shining examples. The preceptor and the pupil become
spiritually one and their lives during their period of preparation and probation are the
lives, not of the master and servant, the preceptor and the scholar, but of the father
and son, or rather of the elder and younger brother. This intellectual brotherhood
creates a new bond which no time can sever. It instils into the young impressionable
youth the love of knowledge, just as the young offspring receives with mute silent
devotion the teachings of its mother. Santiniketan fulfils an ideal, a glorious
and noble one, of a seat of learning and good conduct.

A great poet and a great thinker cannot be impervious to the throbbings of a new
nation. For India of the old has ceased to be, and an India of the new is emerging
out of the toils of men like Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, who have by
their self-sacrifice and incessant prayers made the Indian feel a craving for a fuller life.
The voice of Tagore has been the voice of a Messiah preaching in the wilderness from
which there has emerged an abundant crop of patriotic endeavour and a craving for
liberty. India of yesterday is the India hide-bound in superstition, enslaved by self-
seeking spiritual marauders, atrophied by their gloomy philosophy. The India of
to-day is the India crying for more light, struggling for greater liberty—liberty riot
merely political, but in all domains. The India of to-morrow will be the fulfilment
of the promise of to-day.

NAGPUR HARI SINGH GOUR

More than any other man, Rabindranath Tagore has, through his own works,
taught the world the marvellous beauties of Indian literature and song.

BOSTON, MASS., u.s.A. RICHARD B. GREGG

AN RABINDRANTH TAGORE

Hochverehrter Freundl

A US Ihren Biichern kannte ich Sic als den grossen Dichter, den universellen.
tiefgriindigen und erfolgreichen Mittler zwischen morgen imd abendland-
ischen Kultur, den tapferen Kampfer fiir die Befreiung der Erziehung von der
Padagogik, den genialen Kiinder der Kindesseele, dem in Santiniketan das einzigar-
tige Gliick gelang, denen, die dort heranwachsen, eine ganz gliickliche Kindheit
und Jugend zu sichern, religiose Menschen sich in volliger Natiirlichkeit und
Unbefangenheit, dutch keinerlei Dogmatismus gestort, zu Gotteskindern entwickeln
zu lassen, geschiitzt von jeder ausseren odcr geistigen Vergewaltigung dutch
Erwachsene.

Seitdem ich am Sommer vorigen Jahres das beseligende Gliick gehabt, Ihnen
persdnlich zu begegnen, weiss ich, dass Sie, den Titel eines Philosophen ablehnend,
einer der grbssten Weisen aller Zeiten und Volker sind, die einzige Persdnlichkeit
der neueren Zeit, die an menschlicher Grosse neben Goethe, den grossten Deutschen,
zu stellen ist. In den hundert Jahren aber seit Goethe hat die Welt sich insofern
verandert, als den Nationen und Rassen der Erde ihre Zusammengehorigkeit in der
Menschheit zum Bewusstsein gekommen ist. Moge die Vorsehung es fiigen, dass
in den nachsten hundert Jahren Sie fiir die kulturelle Entwicklung Indiens die
segensreiche Bedeutung erlangen, die Goethe fiir die deutsche Kultur erlangt hat,
und iiber die ganze Erde hin als der Prophet der Menschheitskultur erkannt und
gefeiert werden.

In herziicher Liebe und Verehrung bin Ihr dankbarer Schuler.

ODENWALDSCHULE

PAUL GEHEEB

By Mr. Gogonendranath Tagore.

A TRIBUTE FROM TRINIDAD

Love is the great Amulet that makes this world a garden ; and ‘Hope that comes
to air outwears the accidents of life ; and reaches with tremulous hands beyond the
griwe and death. R. R. S.

Many thousands of miles of sea flow between the vast continent of India, and
the little Island of Trinidad in the West Indies, more picturesquely called by the
Arawaks, the original inhabitants, lere, the Land of the Humming Bird.

Trinidad lies off the delta of the Orinoco river, about i6 miles to the east cf
Venezuela in the north of the Continent of South America. The area of Trinidad
is small, being only 1,754 square miles. It is a beautiful and fertile land, being
verdure-clad from the tip of the highest peak El Tuchuche, 3,000 feet, down to the
sea. The products are sugar, cocoa, coffee, coconuts, rice, Jonca beans and petroleum.

The inhabitants made up of many nationalities, number between three and four
hundred thousand, of which a third are of Indian birth, being the descendants of
agricultural emigrants brought from Mother India to help to build the prosperity of the
island, and for the greater part to find health, happiness and a fair measure of
prosperity for themselves.

And so from the capital town of Port of Spain, throughout the length and
breadth of the island, the sons and daughters of India may be found, Panjabees.
Bengalis, Madrasis, and others. And whilst each section may speak in English, its
own vernacular, or in the dialect that has gradually evolved between them all, with
an admixture of English, each and all revere and love the name of Rabindranath
Tagore. His books of poems and essays are in constant demand from the public
library. Particularly is this true of “Letters To A Friend.”

And his portrait adorns the walls of many a humble as well as wealthy home.
And equally are his writings loved, appreciated and quoted by the educated men and
women of African descent. Indeed one could fittingly adapt the lines written by
the poet Alfred Tennyson, to welcome the beautiful young Princess Alexandra when
she came to England from Denmark to be the wife of the Prince of Wales, afterwards
Edward VII, and say: —

“Indian, African, European,

Whatever we be.

We are all one
In our homage to thee,

Rabindranath.”

And happily there is a cord, a golden, though invisible cord of love that binds
them to Santiniketan, for in a quiet garden where widespreading fruit and shady

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

trees invite repose there is a little cottage called Santiniketan and in which a greeting
from the Poet hangs. And to this little abode of peace come tired school-teachers to
gather strength and refreshment of mind and body to carry on their arduous task of
educating the children of the island, a large number of whom are of Indian descent.

Very deeply do I realize the great honour that has been conferred on me to be
privileged to represent as it were, the sons and daughters of Trinidad, of Indian,
European and African descent, and to write for The Golden Book of Tagore the
expression of the homage, love and devotion that they would lay at the feet of the
revered Poet on the occasion of the celebration of his seventieth birthday.

Oh Poet! who in tender youth
Beneath a tree sat singing.

Your voice upraised in prayer and praise.

Your father solace bringing,

No thought had you that round the world
Your songs would go a-winging.

And as in Trinidad’s fair isle.

Where temple bells are ringing.

Your songs and portrait are the means
Of peace and solace bringing,

Then back to you our eager hearts
With love and praise arc winging.

HEARTSEASE,

TRINIDAD

BEATRICE GREIG

A GOLDEN SINGER

I F length of years were the only claim to remembrance few men would live in the
memories of men, for life at its longest is only a brief span and is obliterated by
death. What we call a man’s personality, his striking presence, the nobility and
beauty of his features, his aplomb are evanescent, for the body is built up of perish'
able material. There is something, however, apart from a man’s physique which
occasionally helps him to conquer death and enables him to leave behind a record of
achievement which does not pass away. Rabindranath Tagore has attained the
biblical age of three score and ten years and the tributes that will be paid to him will
be an acknowledgment of the work he has been able to accomplish in these years, an
expression of gratitude for the great gifts he has made to humanity.

Even now while he is still amongst us the world hails him as a world-poet,
a singer whose melodies contain a world appeal, who has voiced the yearnings and
aspirations of all humanity in verses of singular sweetness and penetration. His
poetry radiates light, it is illuminating, resplendent with the glorious rays of the
morning sun, lighting up the hill-tops and flooding the dark recesses of grottoes.
The scorching and blinding glare of the noonday sun is not reflected by his muse.
His exaltation comes of invincible and abiding faith, not from fitful gusts of passion.
This is the secret of his rapid and universal popularity. The world has reacted
promptly and eagerly to the magic of his songs, because the world longs for words of
faith and the harmony of peace and beauty.

There is an inscrutable purpose behind the unprecedented and world-wide
success of Rabindranath Tagore. He belongs to a subject race which has no
recognised place among the free nations of the world. Many centuries of alien rule
have reduced his people to the position of helots in their own land. They have been
traduced and calumniated by foreign writers and visitors from other lands. Abroad
they are either despised or barely tolerated by western people with an undisguised
consciousness of superiority. The language in which he writes is written and spoken
in only one province of India. Although derived from one of the greatest classical
languages of the world, it is obscure and practically unknown out of Bengal. It
does not yet possess a great literature, nor has it acquired an assured position among
the literary languages of the world. Yet these handicaps, heavy as they undoubtedly
are, have not stood in the way of the personal and literary success of Rabindranath
Tagore. The man as well as his work have had universal acceptance ; Rabindranath
himself has been welcomed with open arms and warm hearts wherever he has gone,
east, west, north and south, and his writings have found a permanent place in the
literature of almost every country in the world. The greatest name in the literature
cf to-day is not to be found in the west, among great and powerful nations, but in
the ancient east among a humble people held in bondage by a western race. So do
the mysterious ways of Providence fulfil themselves and East and West stand side
by side rendering homage to the poet and prophet.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Genius would not be great, i£ it were not unconditioned. The limitations of
language and country, the restrictions of personal liberty are burst asunder by the
unshackled spirit soaring fancy-free in the empyrean and pouring forth its treasure
of song. In the original, the poems and songs of this eastern poet are read and
understood by only a small section of the human race. It is only through the medium
of translations in many languages that his fame has spread in many lands, and many
readers of many nationalities have found his message good for the soul. The essence
has been retained in the translations, the beauty of thought and the subtlety of
suggestion cannot be conveyed in another language. That the gist of the writings has
been understood and appreciated is evident from the large sale of the translated w'orks
and the enthusiasm with which Rabindranath has been greeted wherever he has gone.
.Still the regret remains that the garb in which his muse is originally clothed has to be
stripped in order that others may recognise her in other garments familiar to them.
The glowing light of the jewel remains, but the setting has to be replaced. Else the
world would have known the marvellously musical capacity of the language in which
the poet writes: the mellifluous cadence of the words, the twinkling lilt of the
verse. Bengali is a language that lends itself charmingly to the composition of poetry
and all its resources have been wielded with consummate art by this poet.

What is the secret of this poet’s appeal to all lovers of literature, without dis¬
tinction of country and race? Why is it that his writings are so much sought after
in the Far East and the Far West, among nations divided from one another not only
by great distances but by tradition and custom and different habits of thought?
Rabindranath’s writings have proved, if any proof were needed, that there are certain
characteristics, certain fundamental ways of thinking common to all humanity, and
the heart of the East and the West is stirred alike if it can be touched the right way.
Our poet does not employ exotic methods, the colouring is local and the aroma is
racy of the soil. But the deeper truths that he explores and expounds are the truths
of all time and all humanity, and hence the universality of his appeal. Deep down in
the hearts of all thinking men, no matter what their race and what their colour, is
the desire to understand and to hold to the truth, to attempt to attain to the higher
destiny of the human race. It has been given to this eastern poet to reveal the deep
and steadfast truths of life and to illuminate the depths of human thought.

It is yet too early to say that the world has arrived at a final and accurate estimate
of the genius of this poet. There is no difficulty at all in appreciating the universal
welcome extended to him, or in realising the profound admiration with which his
works have been read all over the world. It is not yet possible, however, to assign
finally his place in the world’s literature. That must necessarily be a matter of
time. Criticisms and high praise of his work, based mainly on translations, have
appeared in many countries. In his own country and among his own people there
is considerable enthusiasm but not much by way of an elaborate examination of the
predominant features of his genius. The one outstanding fact beyond all dispute

lOO

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

is the unparalleled recognition that has come to him in his own lifetime. With
changing conditions in the world, the rapid spread of publicity, the growth of inter¬
nationalism, the broadening of human interests, fame spreads more quickly than it
used to do in the past; but even these favourable conditions do not wholly account
for the phenomenal success of Rabindranath Tagore as an international, nay, a univer¬
sal poet. There have been and there are other famous writers for whom the same
facilities for world-wide celebrity were available, the Nobel prize for literature is
conferred every year, but the works of no other modern writer have been, in such
a short space of time, translated into so many languages as those of this Indian poet.
It is obvious that there must be some special fascination, some irresistible appeal in
his writings.

The present occasion, the completion of the seventieth year of the poet's life,
has been marked by a spontaneous offering of tributes by the poet’s friends and
admirers all over the world. It is a grateful acknowledgment of what the world
owes to him. It is a personal tribute inseparable from the great work done by him
and which has brought his personality into such prominence. This may be con¬
sidered a fitting occasion to strike a personal note. There may be a few friends still
left who have known him young and have known him old, and who may recall
personal memories of the years gone by. As a matter of fact, however, the life of the
poet is an open book of which all the chapters are known to the world. There are
no obscure pages, no elements of romance. His has been a life of high purpose,
clean and pure, and of steady and ceaseless v/ork. His literary activities cover a wide
field. Although his chief distinction is that of a poet, he is no less distinguished as
a dramatist and a writer of fiction, while his work as a critic and essayist is by no means
inconsiderable. His intense patriotism has found expression in his patriotic songs;
the different phases of the political evolution in his own country have found him
alert and watchful, and, whenever necessary, he has fearlessly expressed disapproval
of some particular form of political creed or activity. There has never been any
question of the sincerity of his convictions and the selflessness of his motives.

These are matters which do not call for more than a passing mention. Tlie
world knows and will remember Rabindranath as a maker of exquisite melodies, a
seer who has seen the truth and celebrated it in matchless song, a poet who has
devoted his art to the exposition of the pure and the beautiful, a man of a living faith
which has been a source of unfailing inspiration to him. This is why hands and
hearts have been stretched out to him from every point of the compass and his message
has found willing listeners in every part of the world. His verse has caught and
sounded the harmony of the spheres ; it has the abiding peace of a deep faith and
also the strange pain that accompanies it. Apart from the profound truth that ‘our
sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought’, there is an indefinable heart¬
ache in the realisation of the truth, throbbings of pain that finally cease in peace.
It is only rarely when a man is far more subtly gifted than his fellows that he realises

lOI

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

in himself the travail of creation, the paroxysm of pain which is the inevitable prelude
to peace. This is an experience that cannot be communicated to others. It is an
individual realisation and the result alone can be shared by others.

The impersonal aspect of a man’s genius must transcend his personality. When
we say of any man that he is greater than some achievement that has brought him
fame, we are perfectly aware that the man’s fame will outlive him. Aware of our
own transitory existence we endeavour to hold fast to the passing image of a man.
It is the light that illumines the lamp ; quench the light and the lamp serves no
purpose. We attach so much importance to personality, because we are utterly
ignorant of the personalities of the greatest men of ancient times, men whose claim
to greatness is still beyond dispute. They were wise with a great wisdom and they
did not concern themselves with the trivialities of personality. They have left no
record of themselves and others have said nothing about them. How a man lived
his life, how he looked, how he comported himself were apparently matters of no
moment. Great poets found great commentators but no biographers. There were
numerous and varied glosses upon theological and philosophical works, but no word
was written about the authors. The ancients easily and instinctively distinguished
between the permanent and the impermanent.

The ancient lack of curiosity about the personal history of famous men has now
given way to a spirit of keen inquiry and a strong desire to know all that may be
possible about the life of a man distinguished above his fellows. It so happens that
the personality of Rabindranath Tagore apart from his remarkable genius is eminently
attractive. He would attract attention anywhere in any gathering of men by his
physical and intellectual distinction, the beauty and nobility of his features. Added
to his personal appearance is the singular dignity and purity of his life. The great
strength of his character has been manifest throughout his life, in the hours of trial
and grief. The more one knows the story of his life the greater will be his respect
for the man. One looks in vain for another personality so great as his, so fascinating
in its beauty, so impressive in its strength.

It is a great privilege to have an opportunity of paying our homage to the
genius and character of such a man. For him there are no bounds of nationality or
country. His gift is the heritage of humanity, his voice is the clear expression of
human thoughts struggling for utterance. The world is grateful because he has
given the truth to the world set to beautiful music. It is not for us to worry about
the future, for it does not concern us, though the poet’s own place in the future may
be assured. We make cur bow and pass on, but we feel our lives have been fuller
and richer for what we have learned from this latest of the world-poets. If our hands
cannot lift the veil of the future, nor our eyes penetrate its folds, we can still hear
faintly the music of the future and distinguish the poet’s songs ringing down the
golden steps of time.

BOMBAY NAGENDRANATH GUPTA

102

My respectful salute to the teacher, poet and prophet.

NORHOLM, NORWAY

KNUT HAMSUN

PORTRAIT^SKETCH

Firm lips and shaggy brows,

Hands that a little tremble;

Deep eye that knows

Work; and white hairs which resemble

Pure and perennial snows

On a mountain that once grew green,

But now by a glacial age of its own invaded.
To snowy repose by that cold hand persuaded.
Grows to an end more stern but most serene.
Remembering days that have been.

LONDON

JULIAN S. HUXLEY

103

TAGORE.

I T has been suggested to me that I should make a slight contribution to the
Birthday Volume in which the admirers of Rabindranath Tagore are expressing
their loyalty to their teacher, and their appreciation of his work. For me,
however, it is not easy to comply with the request. I am more than an admirer
of his genius; lover would be nearer the mark; but when one expresses himself in
such terms one remembers that restraint in expression increases with the affection
that would be expressed. One does not send one's love-letters to be published in
the London Daily Mail, or in what answers to the Daily Mail in Calcutta or Delhi.
Such things are kept, as one preserves a rose-leaf in a book, so that the leaf, even if
faded, may recall the open flower that one would preserve from fading. Lie there.
Fair Memory, we say ; we shall know how to turn the pages and find you. Let me
see what it is that I shall find, always keeping in mind that we have still the full¬
blown rose with us, as well as any leaf-memories.

We found our fellowship, which is our friendship and our deepening affection,
on the day when Tagore first came to our little group of Truth-seekers at the Wood-
brooke Settlement 5 he did not come in person, but the door was wide enough open
between East and West to allow of a book being pushed in for our notice ; if ever
a book is the same thing as a person, it was so when we read Gitanjali for the first
time, either alone or in company with those who could value it as such a guest ought
to be valued. That was the Poet’s first visit to Woodbrooke ; he will come in person
later, and Woodbrooke must always be his home.

After reading, or rather revelling, in the pages of Gitanjali, it was natural to
ask questions about the new friend who was behind the new book. What one said
to oneself was as follows:

‘‘The things that are said here sparkle like diamonds with many facets; one
moment you seem to be reading a handbook of Christian devotion ; the next moment,
after the manner of the Sufis, all creeds, all buildings that house creeds, mosques as
well as churches, are left far behind, and the Soul is heard singing like a lark,

‘Sucked up out of sight.

In vortices of glory and blue air.’

Is he, then, a Sufi, or just one of the lovely company that are almost Christians,
because in so many ways they are beyond what is called Christianity? Where did
the man find this secret hunger after God which burns his heart away in great
flames of desire, and will not be satisfied till the whole world is aglow with the heat
from the same central fire and radiant with the light from the same central flame?”

Such were some of the questions that I asked myself when meditating on ‘God
and the Soul in the Songs of Tagore.’ We had found, indeed, a Poet, and more
than a Poet. I am ten years his senior, but am glad to sit down at his feet, with
the rest of his disciples.

WOODBROOKE, ENGLAND

RENDEL HARRIS

TO TAGORE

I T has been my great privilege to enjoy the friendship of Rabindranath Tagore and
of his distinguished relatives, Gaganendranath and Abanindranath, almost from
the date of my arrival in Calcutta thirty-five years ago, when the poet’s father,
the Maharshi Debendranath, was the illustrious family’s venerated head. It is,
therefore, a peculiar gratification to me to be permitted to join in the world-wide
tribute of respect and admiration which will be offered to the poet in celebration of
his seventieth birthday this year.

Rabindranath Tagore’s creative energy, incessant and wide-spreading, inspired
by the highest ideals of Indian culture—yet universal in its appeal like all great art—
has been a pure life-giving stream flowing through the arid sands of political strife,
bringing spiritual joy and clear-sightedness to those who have drunk of its unsullied
waters. May the happiness and strength he has given to so many lives replenish his
own for many years to come.

Happily his freshness of spirit seems to defy the oncome of years. Only last
year he demonstrated this in several public exhibitions of his pen-drawings which
revealed remarkable originality in design and technique. In spite of his preoccupa¬
tions in poetry, drama and music, and the work which a great educational under¬
taking imposes upon him, he yet finds time for and the keenest delight in exploring
new avenues of art. All will rejoice in thinking that this augurs well for many mo’-e
happy and fruitful years being added to his life.

OXFORD E. B. HAVELL

A ustralia, newest of the new civilizations, might not seem likely to have
admirers of Tagore. Yet they are many and would not wish to miss this
opportunity of adding their contribution to the world’s tribute of admiration
and gratitude. It is not merely that the Poet and Philosopher in him are universal
and appeal to hundred spirits whatever the outward circumstances of their lives. No
Australian who passes through the sunburnt plains of India and sees its people living
close to the earth and the elemental things of life, can fail to realize that despite all
the differences, there are common elements in the lives of the two peoples. He too
comes from a people who live with the earth and not merely upon it, who know the
night and the dawn and water, air and fire. To some of them at least Tagore has
given a fuller vision of the inner beauty of that fusion of nature and the human spirit
which is part of their daily lives.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

H. DUNCAN HALL

To MY DEAR Friend Rabindranath Tagore,

I S it really true that you are only 70 years old! Judging from your work, your
wise thoughts and the influence you have had upon our time, one would believe
you were much older.

I remember so well when our great poet. Dr. Verner von Heidenstam, first told
me you had got our Nobel prize for the year 1913, and how happy I v/as that the
greatest thinker and philosopher of my beloved Asia had been honoured. Later,
the same year, I myself became a member of our Swedish Academy that has to
distribute the literary Nobel prize to the greatest author of the running year.

Several years later you came to Stockholm to deliver the public lecture that
every receiver of a Nobel prize has to give. Our Academy at that occasion gave a
dinner in your honour. Several Swedes of fame were present. The Secretary of
the Academy, Dr. Erik Axel Karlfeldt, held the great speech to you. Our Arch¬
bishop Dr. Nathan Sbderblom of Upsala also made a beautiful speech. Amongst
those present were also the great historian Professor Harald Hjarne of Upsala and
the famous archaeologist Dr. Oscar- Montelius. All those four members of the
Academy are dead now.

I remember your speech at that informal dinner where nine of the eighteen
members of the Academy were the hosts and where you and your two secretaries
were the only guests. 1 have a special reason to remember your speech as you
mentioned my expeditions in Asia in the kindest and most encouraging words.

Later on, in 1926, you again came to Stockholm for a day, and that day you
passed in my home, and we made a trip together round Stockholm seeing something
of its beautiful surroundings.

In 1929 I again had the honour and pleasure of meeting you in Tokio, and
again we had a long talk about the extraordinary and deplorable situation in the
world. We found it a great pity to the whole humanity that our time did not possess
one single really capable and wise statesman, a man whose actions were dictated
entirely by righteousness, justice and love. If all those in power now were sent to
an uninhabited island where they could continue their fights in words, words, words,
and you were made the dictator of the world, there would be peace, confidence and
mutual respect, there would be love and sympathy for the sufferings and depressions
of the whole humanity in all countries of the earth.

I know that nothing could give you a greater happiness on your 70th birthday
than the appearance of a Saviour who was strong enough to lead men and nations
according to your noble and human principles.

May God bless you and let the evening of your wonderful life be long and happy!

STOCKHOLM SVEN HEDIN

106

THE SONG OF ABEL'S DEATH

Dead in the grasses lies Abel,

Brother Cain in fright has fled ;

A bird dips his beak in the blood—

Shudders—^flies swiftly away.

The bird flees restlessly over the world,

His flight is shy, and his voice is shrill.

Unceasingly wailing his sorrow:

For the lovely Abel, who far away lies slain.

For the gloomy Cain with grief tormenting his soul.
For his own days of youth, gone for everl

Soon will Cain’s arrow wound his frightened heart.

Soon will he bring dispute and war and death
To startled homes, to peaceful cities,—

Ever making foes for himself and slaying them.

Despairingly hating them and himself.

Pursuing them and himself into all the byways.

Torturing them till another darkness takes the world.

When Cain, at last, himself was slain.

The bird flies on and from his bloody beak
Laments of death re-sound over the world,

Cain hears him, the mother of Abel hears him.
Thousands under the heavenly tent hear his voice.

But many more thousands are deaf to his woes.

They will not know of Abel’s death.

Nor of Cain and his anguish of soul.

Nor of the blood flowing from so many wounds.

Nor of the war which was of yesterday only—

Now told in novels for bored women to read!

For all those, for the satiated, the flippant.

The strong and the brutal.

There is no Cain, no Abel, no death, no sorrow.

No hatred, no war—at the most “a jolly good time!”

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

They do not heed his warnings whenever the sorrowful bird flies by ;
They call him Pessimist, (which, perhaps, he really is)

They feel themselves strong and unconquered

And throw stones at the bird, to drive him away from their homes.

They laugh, they make music so that he cannot be heard.

For his doleful voice disturbs their life’s play.

The bird, with the small drop of blood
On his beak, flies from place to place.

And his wailing for Abel thrills the vast void.

MONTAGNOLA, HERMANN HESSE

SWITZERLAND

[In the spring of 1924, Tagore came to Peking, China. A reception wa
accorded to the poet at the Fe'jen temple, the abbot of which was His Highnes
Rev. Too Kai, the famous Buddhist scholar and monk of China. The poem wa
composed on the occasion.]

He comes from the glorious India, queen of peacocks, which gave him thi
splendour of spirit. He comes from our holy place, the motherland of Buddha, an<
the Bodhi trees provided him with supreme intelligence.

He breathed the cloud'kissed air of the Himalayas, and washed his body in th
sacred river Ganges. His touch revived the ancient soul of India. The Vedas
Upanishads, and Brahmanas stood by him.

Our dream in a dark night ends thus on a sudden. Truth shines forth and mat
says, “It is I.’’ Thus do scented flowers open up in the air, and freely do the swim
ming fishes run to and fro ; a thousand rivers flow gently to the ocean, and tides eb!
and flow between the East and the West.

The East has its rebirth through our Poet-seer. May he live for ever!

PEIPING (Peking)

LIU YEN HON

THE POET & THE DANCE

After an woodcut by Mr. R. Chakravarty, Govt. School of Art, Calcutta

TAGORE

T he seventieth birthday of Rabindranath Tagore may wisely be acclaimed in
a world-wide celebration. For Tagore holds great place to-day in the life
not merely of his nation but of all mankind.

We think of Rabindranath here in the West, first of all, as one of the supreme
poets of all time. As native to the genius of his own culture as Homer to that of
ancient Greece or Dante to that of medieval Italy, Tagore has yet made his voice,
as Homer and Dante made theirs, a part of the lifted chorus of humanity. The
Gitanjali and kindred volumes are the pure distillation of Indian thought and life
and vision. Yet they have already become an immortal part of the literature of
mankind. It is not only natural but inevitable to include in the company of the
world's great poets the exalted figure of this eastern bard.

But Tagore is philosopher as well as poet. In his earlier Sadhana, and in his
latest work. The Religion of Life, he has expounded in prose as noble as his poetry,
and in thought as clear as it is beautiful, the sheer idealism of the East. In an age
when this type of speculation and belief has all but disappeared here in the West,
iTagore's philosophical and religious writings have come like the pouring of a pure
spring of living water into the parched areas of a desert land. Machinery, manu¬
facture, wealth, war have possessed our world, and have reflected their mastery in
the production of materialistic or mechanistic forms of thought. But all the while,
from, the far horizons of another world, has come the calm but magically clear voice
of this Indian sage, reminding us that! the inner spirit is the sole reality, and that the
fulfilment of this spirit is the secret of all life. Will it not be recorded in days to
come that Tagore was one of the influences which served to keep alive, in this
disastrous period of history, the essential soul of man?

As poet and philosopher alike, Rabindranath Tagore has been the supreme
reconciler of East and West. To each, as a sort of inspired mind, he has been the
interpreter of the other. More than any other oriental of whom I know, he has
understood the West, seen the good in the midst of its evil, discerned in its mastery
of the material world an indispensable and permanent contribution to the life of man,
and commended to the East this vast achievement. But just because he has known
the West so well, he has seen its need of what the East could bring—namely, a mastery
of the inner life to match the West’s great mastery of the outer realm of things. If
the West has developed the means of living, the East has found the end of living.
Her people have laid hold upon the spirit, without which no people, whatever their
mechanistic miracles, can hope in the long run to survive. So here was a severed
world, each part of which needed the other, as the two halves of Plato’s mythical
man hungered and searched for one another. To bring these two divisions of

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

mankind together has been Tagore’s great mission. He has journeyed ceaselessly in
his own country, and far afield in China, Japan, Europe, America, even Soviet Russia,
to speak his message of reconciliation and mutual co-operation. That he should have
come at just the time when all the East is awakening to individual and national self-
consciousness, and is in imminent danger of building its new life in hatred of and
hostility to the West, is one of those accidents of circumstance which would seem to
indicate not accident but purpose in the world.

What Tagore has thus done extensively abroad, he has undertaken to do inten¬
sively in his own country. To many of his fellow-countrymen, Tagore s work as 3 -
teacher must mark his greatest contribution at least to the life of his own people.
He has seen precisely what Gandhi has seen in the threatened extinction of Indian
culture before the ruthless invasion of western materialism and militarism. Gandhi
has met the issue by leading his people in a national revolution which has compassed
in one vast movement the economic, political and social forces of his age, and there¬
with has proved himself the greatest statesman of his time, as well as the purest saint
and most potent popular leader of all time. With the spirit and purpose of Gandhi s
nationalist cause, if not with every detail of method, Rabindranath Tagore has always
been in basic sympathy. But the poet and philosopher, like the Mahatma himself,
has had his own approach to the one problem—his own way of contributing to tne
salvation of his people’s life. This has been, as a specific work apart from the general
work of writing and speaking, his task of education as embodied in his school which
has become one of the most important educational institutions not only of India but
of the world. Here he has awakened the soul of India to itself, and laid down
methods by which the awakening may continue, and spread to the remotest corners
of the land, long after his own inspired presence has been withdrawn. Tagore the
teacher takes rank with Tagore the poet and philosopher. Side by side with Gandhi,
he serves the age’s cause. As different as Erasmus and Luther, these two men, each
in his own distinctive way, labor to bring in that new period of world history which
must mark an epoch in the annals of mankind.

Rabindranath Tagore is one of those happy men who look the part they play*
Who that has ever seen him can forget that serenely beautiful countenance, that tall
and noble form, that mien of ineffable dignity and exaltation! I remember, when
first I saw his figure clad in its softly flowing robes, that I thought myself in the
presence more of a god than of a man. Later I came to feel that this presence was
the veritable incarnation of the poetic soul—the outward and visible form of the
inward and spiritual grace. Surely it is this which makes a meeting with Tagore to
partake of the nature of a sacrament. More than by any ceremony before an altar,
I was made to feel by the man himself the sense of mystic reverence and awe.

COMMUNITY CHURCH JOHN HAYNES HOLMES

NEW YORK

JHE DREAM OF LIFE

Our days of love are over ;

But other loves abound.

And sweetly springs the clover.

And in new woods around
Are birds of happy sound.

In the grass'covered meadows.

Where the low swallow gleams.
Beneath the skydaid shadows—
Beside light'Stepping streams.
The bending willow dreams.

There, under grey leaves leaning.

The brook goes waving by.

O man, read here the meaning
Of life, and feast your eye:
Things pass, and we must die.

On streams that have no finish
Our little lives are writ.

Time’s flow shall not diminish.

While down the course of it
Like withered leaves we flit.

Below the leaning willow

The grey leaves fall, and fall:
Down on a watery pillow

They drift beyond recall;

And the stream takes them all.

Stone, stream, and time are deathless:

And in them dwells no sense:
Dumb in their bonds, and breathless.
Blind in their providence.

They roll, and bear us hence.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

But we—O eyes that waken!

O feet that walk on light I
For all the breaths we’ve taken.

And the long day’s delight.

Now thank advancing night!

Had night not lain around us
How little should we know!

Light through the darkness found us ;

And, wakened by its glow.

We kissed, and now must go.

Our day of love is over;

But other loves abound;

And life is still in clover;

And in new woods around
Are birds of happy sound.

In the grass-covered meadows

Where the low swallow gleams,

Beneath the sky-laid shadows—

Beside light-stepping streams,

Old willows dream their dreams.

SOMERSET, ENGLAND LAURENCE HOUSMAN

EL MISSATGE DE CATALUNYA

E ls grants poetes suren en mitg de les ones de la civilizatcio quant un’ era grant
s’ acosta. Son els portaveus de la generacio futura. Aixis el grant Kalidasa
aparague en el nord de 1 ’ India quand Chandra Gupta Vikramaditya preparava
els seus exercits per la victoria, quand la grand era de Nalanda se dibuixava en
I’horitzo, quand els peregrins de la China pensavan en visitar 1 ' India com 1 ’ empori
de 1 ’ educacio de I’Orient.

Aixo is Tagore per I’lndia moderna. Ell li ha ensenyat lo qu’ es i lo que sera.
Vullga Deu que’ ella, i el seu poeta amb ella, tornin llurs mirades envers la font de
tota grandesa. Llavors la civilizatcio de I’lndia sera grand. Llavors Tagore sera el
verdader missatger de la grand India.

BOMBAY H. HERAS, S.J.

II2

THE POET AT WOODBROOKE

T he month of May, 1930, has become memorable in the annals of our
community, because it was the occasion of the visit of the famous Indian
poet and internationalist, Rabindranath Tagore. His visit had been most
eagerly looked forward to, but all our expectations were exceeded. The Poet was
with us for a number of days on three several occasions. He shared in the common
life of our colleges at Selly Oak (for Woodbrooke is one of a family of eight colleges);
and wherever he went he left the impression of spiritual beauty, calm and strength.
He was present on several occasions at the devotional meetings with which we begin
our day—silent meetings for the worship of God. At three of these he spoke briefly,
and the words which he said and even more the spirit in which he' said them made a
very deep impression upon all his hearers.

One afternoon the Poet went with some of us to see the spring flowers in the
beautiful Forest of Arden, which lies some distance to the south'east of Birmingham,
on the outskirts of which great city our community is situated. Those of us who
went with him on this occasion will not soon forget the happiness which the sight
of those flowers gave to him.

On one occasion, when the Woodbrooke family was gathered to hear a reading
by our guest from some of his own works, the proceedings began with the presenta-
tion of a boquet of wild flowers to the Poet by the youngest child of our community,
a little girl of three. It was a pleasant sight to see the grave kindliness with which
the famous writer received the simple gift.

What remains in my mind, above all, as a memory of Rabindranath Tagore's
visit, is the picture of him sitting amongst us in our Common Room, and reading to
us from Gitanjali those great words t

“Our Master himself hath joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation.

He is bound in our midst for ever.’

WOODBROOKE, BIRMINGHAM JOHN S. HOYLAND

Minel tobbet ismerek meg India lelkebo l, annal ero'sebb lett bennem a gyanu,
hogy az igazi keresztenyseg elhagyta Europat es Azsiaba koltbzbtt.

BUDA'PEST

HERCZEG FERENC

[translation]

The more I know the soul of India the stronger does the suspicion grow in me
that the spirit of Christianity has migrated from Europe, and has again appeared in
Asia.

‘ THE GODS’ OWN WAY ’ AND WORLD PEACE

I N this our Land of the Rising Sun there has been in force from time immemorial
a moral code called ’The Gods’ Own Way.’ This code has formed throughout
the ages and will continue to form for all times the corner-stone of our civilization.
True it is that stimuli and impulses from without have often contributed to our
peculiar form of culture, but the ‘Gods’ Own Way’ has for ever proved a happy check
on undue exotic influences, and has thus enabled us to maintain our assimilative
capacity and the desire of adopting only that which is good.

In its earliest form the ‘Gods’ Own Way’ set great store by innocence and
purity of heart, and this becoming the traditional characteristic of the nation, we
Japanese have come to judge our every word and deed by the degree of our conformity
to this standard.

In ancient China three, and sometimes five cardinal virtues were spoken of,
while classical Greece recognized her four supreme moral excellences. What is
cherished by a nation as its guiding principle is often found to change with time.
We have, however, throughout all ages been true to that one and only teaching of
pure-heartedness, peculiar to our people.

In the reign of Emperor Temmu (673-686 A.D.), we find that the four supreme
virtues of guilelessness, purity, uprightness and honesty were held in high esteem.
Yet all these may with propriety be considered as but synonyms of pure-heartedness,
our national virtue par excellence, which has gradually developed into what is known
as nori (law) and michi (way), until it is now known as Kan'nagara-nO'michi, i.e.,
‘The Gods’ Own Way.’

The wholesale adoption of Western civilization by this country after the Meiji
Restoration of 1868 has for a few obscured the real direction and significance of the
‘Gods’ Own Way,’ and has caused no little confusion in our manner of thinking, more
especially noticeable among our young students. Yet it is indisputable that the
unshakable ‘Gods’ Own Way’ still reigns over the great majority of the Japanese
people.

What is then the ‘Gods’ Own Way’?

It may literally be rendered as the ‘Way the Gods Themselves Follow’. Yet such
a description does not bring us to a clearer understanding.

Old archives show that our forefathers did not call their guiding moral principle
michi but nori. Now nori means the ‘law’, i.e., the way all people should
follow. To this day every Imperial Rescript is known as mikotonori or ‘what the
Emperor has spoken to His people.’ This, of course, because His august edict is
proclaimed as a law for His subjects to obey. If the word michi were used in early
times, it would appear to have been in its literal sense of ‘a road’ along which to walk
or ride. Not until after the introduction of Confucianism in A.D. 285 did the

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

figurative use of the word as way’ come into use. .Then did tnichi in most cases
come to replace nori as meaning ‘law’, and to stand for the Chinese character tao in
Its abstract sense. Yet must it not be forgotten that michi was not understood in
Its Confucian application, but that it came to represent that peculiar moral principle
which had already been developed among us Japanese.

Michi or the way is something unchangeable and everlasting; it is universal in
its application, belonging to the world at large, and no one country may call it her
own. In other words, it is an absolute existence, knowing no distinction of race, time
or space. Hence its designation as the ‘Just Way of Heaven and Earth.’ It corres-
ponds to what some understand by the term logos. This principle, abstract and
unique as it is in its very essence, assumes, however, different forms as it reveals itself
through an endless variety of environments, giving to us that michi, the ‘Gods’ Own
Way, peculiar to us Japanese people, Confucianism and Taoism to China, and
Buddhism to India, while it inspired the idea of the logos in the mind of the ancient
Greek philosophers.

Michi may well be unique and absolute in its origin, but in its relation to human
affairs it is liable to a certain modification depending upon circumstances. In Japan
too, the original michi has undergone inevitable changes in the course of its adjust¬
ment to the soil where it was ultimately to take root.

In this Land of the Rising Sun’ all without distinction of social rank are
expected to conduct themselves consciously or unconsciously according to the teaching
of the ‘Gods’ Own Way.’ As practised by the Emperor himself, this way is called
the Kodo, or the Imperial Way, in contradistinction to the Shindo, which means the
michi as observed by his faithful subjects. The practice, because of its ancient
origin, is sometimes spoken of as Kodo or the ‘Old Way’; but as it is not limited by
considerations of time only, the word is but rarely used.

The practice of deifying some of Japan’s great men of recent times may be
explained as the process of converting them into so many objects of Shinto worship
and personifications of the ‘Gods’ Own Way.’

Bushido, a word now widely understood in the West, is the michi or ‘Way’ as
practised by the Samurai. These members of the warrior class in the feudal days of
Japan considered it a point of honour to conduct themselves in time of peace, but
more especially on the battle-field, in strict accordance with their michi. They,
moreover, firmly believed that any show of prowess unworthy of this moral code v/as
nothing but a mere savage display of animal courage, entirely alien to Bushido.

Judo, the ‘way of suppleness,’ Kendo, the ‘way of fencing,’ Kyudo, the ‘way of
archery,’ Sumodo, the ‘way of wrestling,’ and all the other ‘dos/ as applied to the arts
of physical training, derive their true meaning as they seek to remain true to the
spirit of michi, the ‘Gods' Own Way.’ The same came to be said of indoor
occupations such as Chado or the ‘Way of the Tea-ceremony,’ the Kwa-do, the ‘Way
of Flower-arrangement,’ Kodo, the ‘Way of Incense-burning,’ etc.

“5

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Generally speaking, all the forms of art base themselves on the divine michi, the
‘Gods’ Own Way.’ We sometimes refer to this as Shido i.e. ‘the way par excellence/
which in China is used to designate the exclusive doctrine of their own, which is
Confucianism. To us Japanese it is Sotten, that is our ‘imperative duty.’ To lose
it would mean the loss of our very essence. It is therefore with a sense of deep regret
and shame that we see how the radiance of this ‘God’s Own Way, so dear and sacred
to us, has become somewhat dimmed, by the importation from the West of foreign
doctrines like imperialism, utilitarianism and materialism. Yet do we stand in no
danger whatsoever that complete darkness may overcloud the moral principle of this
land of ours.

When our nation is threatened by evil and crafty dealings, we are not backward
in rousing our whole people to that strong sense of righteous indignation which impels
us to strive unceasingly until the cause of the threatened corruption is removed. This
does not mean that our michi does not embrace the doctrine of non-resistance, but
that it considers the realization of abiding international peace and goodwill as more
worthy of its dignity. Indeed, it may rightly be said that its aim and ultimate end
is the bringing about of world peace. In this connection, we might quote the song
of the great Emperor Meiji;

Yomo no umi
Mina harakara to
Omou yo ni,

Nado namikaze no
Tachisaivagu ran?

(When I am firmly convinced of the universal brotherhood of the peoples across
the seven seas, why is it that some prove so very violent and insurgent?’

The spirit of world-wide fraternity is here breathed nobly in every syllable of the
poem, and it is well worthy of the One Who identified Himself with the ‘Gods’ Own
Way.’ It is the ideal of our michi that it should not only affect peaceful rule within
the boundaries of this Empire, but also that it should eliminate all those refractory
elements in the world at large which are an impediment to the establishing of inter¬
national calm and happiness, and which would tend to destroy the purity and
innocence of our world. When this spirit of peace and humanity holds sway over us,
then may we say that the whole nation is permeated by that true spirit of Yamoto
of old. To speak of it as something anti-foreign is but to betray one’s lack of under¬
standing and narrow-mindedness. No nation is free from lowering clouds that would
sometimes threaten to burst upon even its purest members. Yet no people, even at
the darkest hour of its danger, is ever without its men endowed with the righteous
spirit needed. It should be our aim that those great souls be inspired to work together
so that a real and lasting peace may be established in the world.

TETSUJIRO INOUE

TOKYO

'*'■’• ‘^P I .' - • ,’*n^ ‘'■' •i'’^,-*'’, ‘^(^ !?.’!^
»dr-,'i'r '■*7 ii.nr^.SftFp,|r’-^s»i|‘*irj*J#

THE EAST AND THE WEST

T '^IME after time, the wisdom of the East has been offered to the world, and its
civilization has been given a turn for the better; and the interpreters of this
wisdom have ever been the sons of the Aryan race.

In a dim and distant past, Zarathushtra, the Prophet of the Aryan race, gave to
the world the Message of Truth. Mankind had hardly learnt the art of living in
peaceful and ordered agricultural settlements when Zarathushtra raised his protest
against a nomadic and savage existence, and showed to his followers and the world
the advantages of a peaceful existence of a well-ordered society. On the spiritmil
side, he showed them how to attain to perfection and happiness in this world and to
salvation and immortality in the presence of the Divine Beloved in the life hereafter
by choosing the Path of Truth (Asha) and following the triple principles of Good
Mind {Vohumana), Holy Power (Khashthra), Love and Devotion (Armaiti), the
fruitful ways of Wisdom, selfless Action, and devoted labour of Love. Through these
Paths, Zarathushtra assured mankind that everyone would meet and see the Divine
Beloved as he himself had met and seen.

That sister portion of the Aryan race that were leaving their Iranian brethren
in the North-west, and were crossing over the Hindu Kush and were entering the
land of the seven rivers, had their own great sages, propounding the same great wisdom
that we see culminating in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita. The Path is
again indicated as lit by the beacon light of Truth (Sat), and the Divine Essence is
again described approachable through the Jnana Marga, the Karma Marga and the
Bhakti Marga, the triple ways of Wisdom, Action and Devotion.

This wisdom of the Aryan race^ of the ancient Iranians and the ancient Indians,
has remained unassailed and unassailable through the passage of time. Fearful
cataclysms both the component parts of the Aryan race have gone through, but the
intense heat of all calamities, has only made the Wisdom come out of the ordeal, purer
and brighter like the purest gold. Princes of poets like Hafiz in Persia and Kabir in
India have given expression to the same wisdom, although then the world about them
was in the throes of turmoil and strife.

During all these times, the West and the rest of the world gleaned the corn
from the harvest of the East through its travelling philosophers. The very first of
them, Pythagoras, came to Persia and learned the wisdom of the Magians; and he
must have learnt it well too; for, in a fragment that is left to us, he describes the
Persians as contemplating the Supreme Creator exactly as the sacred Avesta describes
Him, viz., that His body is Light and His Soul is Truth and that the way to meet
Him was the Way of Truth. The last statement is an exact translation of the Avestan
fragment which says; "There is only One Path, and that is the Path of Truth.”

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

But now in the twentieth century, almost a miracle has happened. Both the
wisdom o£ the East and its deep philosophy, which have hitherto been offered in weak
or inadequate translations, have been offered to two continents of the West,—Europe
and America, in original English itself,—the current language of the cultured of
the present age ? and this has been done through the superb and soubelevating pro'
ductions of Tagore and Gandhi. In Rome, in Vienna, in Paris, in London,—in these
big cities, the political and intellectual centres of the great nations of the West, one
feels and realises how these two great Indians, have not only raised the name of India
and the Indians in the estimation and esteem of the West; but that by their writings
which directly approach them and appeal to them, a veritable thirst has been created
in the West for the wisdom of the East.

Unless there is a better and a more intimate cultural and spiritual understanding
between the East and the West, a great calamity stares the world in the face. But
should such an understanding be an accomplished fact, it might be the precursor of
universal peace and brotherhood in this world. If this vision ever comes true, the
future history of the world, will attribute it most to the two great men of the present
age, Gandhi and Tagore, both coming from the ancient land of India, both sons of the
great Aryan Race.

BOMBAY D. J. IRANI

ii8

HOMAGE JO RABINDRANATH TAGORE
The Truth shall make you free.

What is Truth?

Truth is the reality of knowledge, as good is the reality of being. It is the
essence of life, and must be the principal object of realization of man.

What is Reality?

Reality, the first principle of Reason, is the form of the Divinity, the form of the
Absolute, the full Identity of being and knowledge of Ego and non-Ego in man,—the
Identity, seized by the same knowledge.

What is Knowledge?

Knowledge, the creative faculty of reason, is one of the two poles of Reality,
which tends ever to the union with the second one, the Being, in order to become the;
fullness of Reality, a form of Divinity, absolute.

What is human truth on the earth?

The human truth on earth is a relative truth, that is not entirely fulfilled as the
imperfect union of being and knowledge, the incomplete reality of knowledge in man.
yet ever on the way to the full one. The Absolute Truth is the Perfect Union of
Beir'.g and Knowledge, the Perfect Reality of Knowledge in man.

What is the criterion of Absolute Truth in man?

It is the quantity, the extent of the Absolute Reality, of the Divinity’s form in
man, conquered by his sacrificing merit (the creative word in man).

What is this criterion called in the current human language?

It is called the creative inspiration in Art and revelation in religion.

What is Art, then?

Art is the self'Creation of Absolute Reality, of divine Harmony between Being and
Knowledge in man. It is verily a God’s gate in man, God’s Word leading to God,
to Truth, to Reality.

Is man able to open this gate entirely?

More or less. Human values and merits decide his tendencies and efforts.

Rabindranath Tagore is one among those few who are gifted with the highest
inspiration of God, of Truth, of the Absolute Reality. He is on the way to God.
He is nearest to His Reality.

Therefore, let Immortal Glory be to Himl

WARSAW

JOSEPH JANKOWSKI

TAGORE IN GUJARAT

T he Tagore family has been known to Gujarat for more than a generation.
The late Narayan Hemchandra was the first writer who made Gujaratis
familiar with the beauties of Bengali Literature and in a way introduced
the Tagore family to them. But this introduction was not to remain impersonal
or merely academic. Maharshi Debendra Nath Tagore visited Ahmedabad, very
early in the life of its Prarthana Samaj and delivered a sermon in the Samaj Mandir.
Satyendra Nath Tagore was stationed in Ahmedabad for a long time as a District
and Sessions Judge, and he had picked up sufficient Gujarati, not only to be able
to converse in that language and thus mix with Gujaratis, but his knowledge went
further and he very often delivered sermons in Gujarati from the pulpit of the
same Mandir. Dr. Tagore visited his elder brother (Satyendra Nath) in those days
and was thus not an utter stranger to Gujarat. The ball set rolling by Narayan
did not stop in its motion and the interest in Bengali Literature aroused by his writings
(mainly translations) in the minds of Gujaratis was kept alive by others who followed
in his wake. So that when Dr. Tagore brought out his Gitanjali —the great work
which at a bound made him famous in both hemispheres—it was hailed in Gujarat,
and received with open arms, because the soil was prepared for it; Gujaratis had
already become familiar with the spirit of Bengali literature, prose and verse. Transla¬
tions were made of its most beautiful songs, and articles dealing with the work and
its author became a feature of Gujarati journals and monthlies at that time. On
the top of this popularity came his visit to Ahmedabad in April, 1920, when the
Sixth Gujarati Sahitya Parishad was in Session. Mahatma Gandhi was instrumental
in getting the Poet to consent to come to Ahmedabad, at a time when the weather
there is none of the pleasantest, there being unbearable heat, unrelieved by any
breezes. He attended the Session of the Parishad as an honored guest, an address
was presented to him and he replied to it in a memorable speech. A meeting in
a large open maidan was held later in his honor, speeches were made by him and
others. Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, who happened to be present there, sang Ayi
Bhuvana'tnano'mohini, in her beautiful voice, and a most successful gathering of
thousands, men, women and children, dispersed after doing him homage, singing
Bande Maturam. He was cheered, he was feted, he was apotheosised. A large
evening party was given by Sheth Ambalal, a millionaire of Ahmedabad, with
whom he had put up, and the Poet relaxed so far as to sing some of his own songs
in response to the repeated requests made to him by the guests, and those who were
privileged to hear the music of his voice, amidst the charming surroundings of Sheth
Ambalal's Bungalow at Shahibag that night, will for ever cherish in their minds
the memory of that unique occasion. At a public garden party. Dr. Tagore was

120

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

made to witness a scene, familiar enough in Gujarat, but not met with elsewhere,
which he had never witnessed before, and he was charmed with it. I mean the Garba,
in which girls, small and big, sing songs, while moving round and round a circle,
with movements of hands which entrance by their rhythm, and movements of the
body that magnetise by their mechanical regularity. Dr. Tagore was so impressed
by the music and rhythm of this indigenous feminine sport and mode of enjoyment,
no less than that of worship, that he expressed a desire to take the girls away to
Saatiniketan with a view to transport the Garba to Bengal. This welcome, sincere
and heartfelt, as it was, no doubt greatly moved the Poet, and it seems to have
convinced him of the influence he wielded and the impression he had made on the
people of Gujarat, especially its youth. After that Dr. Tagore’s writings and books
followed in rapid succession, and Gujaratis did not fall behind others, both in and
and outside India, in profiting by them. Such costly institutions as the educational
and other classes conducted at Santiniketan are always in want of funds, and
the generosity of Gujarat and Kathiawar has responded nobly to the call of the
Poet. Whenever he chose to tour our province for the purpose, Ahmedabad, Baroda
(whose generous'hcarted and cultured Maharaja never failed him), and even a com^
paratively small State like Limbdi, have helped him to the best of their ability. The
Poet has thus been able to make many friends in Gujarat. His admirers are, however,
far greater in number, and his influence is sure to abide for ever. Many young men
and to some extent women, have taken to the study of Bengali, so as to be able to
follow his writings the better in the original. It is thus that the Poet has helped,
unconsciously, the cause of interprovincial amity, for surely nothing promotes the
cause so well and cements it so firmly as the knowledge on the part of one province
of the language and literature of another. Gujarat will ever remain proud of the
fact of its having entertained the Poet right royally and helped him, however
inadequately and slightly, to go forward with a scheme, which is his pet and which
for ever lies next to his heart.

BOMBAY K. M. JHAVERI

Please accept Humanistic Club’s and mine hearty congratulations on your
seventieth birthday. May you live long to see humanity appreciate and practise
your cherished ideal of the world as one big happy family.

BANGALORE

RAJA JAIPRITHVI

Beloved Friend,

I like to think of the contributors to The Golden Book of Tagore as a large
family of children who, on your birthday, bring you a token of their affection and
gratitude. Each one of them will make a different offering and most probably
in a difEerent manner ; some will make their offering in themes of verse and prose,
with some little devices as their hearts dictate, or according to what they think will
please ; and I, who cannot do any of these things greatly, ramble into the garden
of my mind and the fields of my spirit, and gather the fairest flowers I can find.
Though they be but simple wild^roses, I know you will be more gratified by such
a variety than if all your friends brought you stately wreaths of eulogy.

As our thoughts dwell lovingly on your noble and wise work, we are lifted
to a higher level of effort and devotion. To realize the meaning of your message
of friendship and cO'Operation is to deepen the furrows from which shall spring
richer harvests of inspiration.

In the sweet solitude of a Poet’s life you heard a Voice bidding you look into
the hearts of your fellowmen and seek the way to deliver them from the grotesque
gods of their own creation. You stepped forth into the crowded abodes of men
where strife is bitter, and ignorance is deep. Taking little children by the hand,
you led them into gardens of delight and taught them to live in sympathy with
all that is beautiful, and to live all that is love-worthy.

Again the Voice bade you go from land to land in search of knowledge. With
observing eye and listening ear you journeyed, and saw the curse of division, the
darkness of prejudice, the deafness of hate in which men live as strangers and enemies.
But, looking long and patiently, you found the dynamic force of love hidden in
humanity .... the force which, understood, shall transform their life of self'
destruction into a life of creative work and peace. To a world living under the
law of fear you are a Prophet of the Law of Love.

Your school at Visva-Bharati is a bright pledge of a nobler civilization; for it
is a meeting'ground of the East and the West. There you teach in object'lessons
of sympathy and good-will that the true happiness of individuals and nations is
identified with the highest good of mankind. When this supreme truth is grasped,
the dream of all the greatest teachers spoken through the ages shall be fulfilled;
“Wars will be dead; hatred will be dead, boundaries will be dead; dogmas will
be dead; man will live, he will possess something greater than all these .... the
whole of earth for his country and the whole of Heaven for his hope.’’

Long may you be spared, dear Master, to foster the unitive love from which
shall spring constructive thinking and the upbuilding of a new social order 1

With affectionate memories of our fleeting but precious few minutes together
and the warmth of your hand in mind, I am.

Faithfully and gratefully yours,

NEW YORK HELLEN KELLER

122

TAGORE

T agore represents in the very finest way the spiritual history of India flowing
forth into the future, leaving behind its outworn parts and blending itself with
the best in the cultures of all the worlds. He and his University represent
India in the dignity of her past taking the next step forward.

His appreciation of the West goes much deeper than that of most other leaders
of India. He has often been criticized in India by extremists because he will not
speak against the West as they would have him do. Instead he defends the West
for its practical idealism and its broad vision. He senses with the clarity of a
Prophet that the East and the West are great and how much greater they could
become if they could be brought into closer co-operation with each other. His social
and international programme is highly practical and far-sighted and is well expressed
in the policy of his University.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK WILLIAM H. KILPATRICK

I revere and love you, the painter and the poet, in equal measure.

May long years be yet granted to you.

BAD TOLZ, BAVARIA KATHE KOLLWITZ

I have suffered very much in our Western materialism and barbarism ; and I have
prayed to God, he might send me a spirit from the Orient to give me a true perspec¬
tive of life, and Tagore came like the fulfilment of my prayer.

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, U.S.A. J. KUNZ

123

THE BEAUTY AND VALUE OF TAGORE’S THOUGHTS

F or countless ages from the beginning of society mankind has depended upon the
seers, poets, and heroes for all the knowledge which has enabled the human
family to emerge from the obscurity of savagery to the dawn of civilization.
Some races have contributed more than others in producing the prophets who have
the intuition to comprehend subtlety of truth, and to foretell what destiny has in
store for the race. Others again produce men of genius with diverse gifts, who
become leaders, teachers or poets, and excel in their exposition of the mysteries of
existence, in their description of phenomena or abstract concepts, or in the discovery
of contrivances for the needs of the race, struggling for existence in a world of endless
conflicts.

From the start surely human life has been made possible by the emergence of
Reason, which has slowly but steadily provided the arguments which justify the
belief in a possible world of peace and happiness for mankind despite the fearful
carnage and cruel destruction all around. .These problems received the attention
of Indian seers in very ancient times. They left the heritage of their speculations in
their literature which has reflected throughout the ages the light of Truth and
Wisdom, that have made India the home of poetry, mysticism, religion and
philosophy.

The outstanding feature of the genius of Tagore is the wonderful capacity for
minute observation of all aspects of Nature, and of perceiving, true to the instincts
of an Indian sage, the mute language of creation with its infinite variations of melody
and harmony. His mind is a perfect mirror to reflect the infinite apparitions of
Beauty. The weird phantasmagoria of Life appears to him as quite an unmistakable
manifestation of the Eternal. But stern reality is not lost sight of. None lives for
ever. Whence come our miseries? Can the ordinary man see in the bud, or in the
drop of dew on the lotus leaf emblems of life? But to the philosopher, when lifs
ends, the rnystery of Death begins.

On this subject of Death, which is so commonly distorted by fear, misconception
and superstition, Tagore expresses his innermost feelings in simple but profound
language. He experienced its awful advent quite early in life. Yet in mature years
he says:

‘Death had given me the correct perspective from which to perceive the
world in the fulness of its beauty, and as I saw the picture of the universe
against the background of Death, I found it entrancing.’

Tagore sees in death an inevitable phase of life, and his philosophy finds a ready
solution, which enables him to see in the inexorable role of Death visions of Joy I
Is it not the portal through which to meet the Eternal?

124

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

It is only natural, however, that Love should be an entrancing theme to the
gentle and amiable poet, who sees everywhere, in each blade of grass, in every flower,
in the song of birds, and in everything, the evidences of the Beautiful. The origin
of the instinct, which impels man to seek love at its fountain may be lost in the
remotest antiquity. The poet, however, needs no Freudian analysis to discover in
woman the source of so much happiness and of so much tears.

‘O woman! You are one half woman and one half dream.’

In a brief survey like this, it is impossible to do justice to the philosophy of
Tagore, but perhaps it may be summarized by calling it the Gospel of Nature, since
it draws its parables from the grass, the rocks, the streams, the song of birds, and the
light of the heavens.

Not only does it reveal to us the arcana behind these appearances but also, what
is more important, it points in emphatic and unmistakable language to the avenue
through which the willing one seeking the Truth may behold the Good in all its
Majesty and Glory.

It is indeed difficult to appreciate fully the profundity of the apparently simple
thoughts which Tagore gives expression to in response to the appeals of his delicate
senses when they come in contact with Nature. His soul seems at once to vibrate in
full harmony with the orchestra of melodies and echoes reflected from the sound of
rushing waters, from the songs of birds, from the gushing of winds, from the rustling
of leaves, from the babbling of babes, from the laughter of lovers, from the roar of
thunder or from the noise of the crowd.

In the depths of nature, the eye of faith sees the illumination of Love. The
music of a seer makes the echoes of its mysterious movements resound in our ears as
captivating song and melody. Thus from the infinity of space, love finds its abode
in all things. In the discovery of Love, Tagore finds the matrix, which binds
humanity into the solid frame of a conglomerate, which must find its fitting place
in the harmony of the cosmos. Mankind must get knowledge and wisdom to behold
the light of Truth, which will show the path of Freedom and Happiness,—^mere
shadows and vain illusions, unless in the presence of the All-good.

The unity of the entire universe is best seen through rhythmic vibration. The
oscillations in each human soul must move in harmony with its entire environment.
I'hen surely beauty will find its due place, and every movement and every sound
will pass on to finite space in full accord with the eternal law. There is no break
possible. The wildest chaos—the cataclysms of the stars—^reveals in fact a perfect
sample of the invariability of the order of Nature. The mind of man must learn
how to discover the harmony of colour and sound. It must also learn to attune the
soul to the music of the spheres and to find peace and happiness in the world.

Then a revelation comes as the light with the dawn. The pains and miseries
of life disappear, as the darkness and the mist when the sun rises. Death itself, in

125

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

this ecstasy of living in full accord with the spirit of the Eternal, approaches as the
harbinger of Peace, bringing the consolation that the wheel of existence thus turns
on, making way for new births in the march of time and change. Like all mortals,
Tagore had sufiEered at first from the pangs and sorrows which Death's visit brought
to his family. But his philosophy surmounted all the obstacles which obscured the
truth at first, until he had ascended the top of the mountain of experience and could
perceive over all the hills and the woods, the purifying work performed by merciful
Death. Death has for ages been a source of fear, misery and pain, because people
have not pondered over the Truth.

01 ye who suffer and fear the approach of Death, hear the music of Tagore.
Learn from him to lose yourselves in the Infinite and the Eternal I

Just tune the chords of your being and make them move in harmony with the
music of the cosmos, then Death just becomes the prelude to a change of melody on
another key!

So throughout Tagore’s philosophy everything is worthwhile. Every man and
woman should strive to secure the light of Truth, and live simply and wisely for the
common good.

Thus the philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, in essence, is identical with the
profound Monism of the ancient Chinese cult, preserved for the world by Confucius.
All existences constitute the one organism of the entire cosmos, emitting love as the
highest manifestation of its vital energy, and having as its rational soul the centre
of the spiritual galaxy.

In presenting this humble tribute to the Indian sage, whom the world honours,
the author takes this opportunity to express this earnest prayer on behalf of the
Chinese people, that he may live long to give the world more of his noble teachings
out of his inexhaustible mind.

UNIVERSITY OF AMOY, LIM BOON KENG

CHINA

126

R abindranath Tagore is the greatest man I have had the privilege to
know. He is very much greater than his world reputation and above all,
his position in India imply. There has been no one like him anywhere on
our globe for many and many centuries. That is, Rabindranath is the creator of a
nation. Everywhere, the Logos has been the first creator of things; it is only in
decadent ages that he becomes a mere interpreter. And, in most cases, he becomes
incarnate in a poet because the latter’s love of metre and rhyme makes him, more
than the pure philosopher, one with the rhythmical nature of the phenomenal
Universe. Thus most nations have been created by some blessed poet who gave
voice to their stammering longing.

The last historical figure of this kind in Europe has been Homer, though Orpheus
probably was the true creator of Greece. In a few centuries mankind will realize
that Rabindranath Tagore means very much the same to India. His were the greatest
songs of her aspiring Liberty; his was the creation of the first alLhuman prestige of
modern Indian man. That other figures seemed to mean more than Rabindranath
to present-day struggling India is due to the fact that modern India is in her birth-
pangs. Rabindranath, however, is the great model of the full-grown cecumenic
Indian of centuries to come. In this he should mean much the same to India as
Goethe has meant and means to Germany.

I will say no more. I admire my great friend Rabindranath Tagore as I admire
no other living man, because he is the most Universal, the most encompassing, the
most complete human being I have known. A while ago, the inventor of the science
of Graphology, the old Frenchman Crepieux-Zamin, came to see me in search of
handwritings of what he called "noble souls." He found very few in my collection
that could satisfy him. But when I showed him Rabindranath’s handwriting, the
old man—much older than the Hindu poet, burst into tears: "How beautiful and
how noble! I know of no handwriting of this level since the great days of the
European Renaissance."

May my great friend continue to live and work for the benefit of all of us for
many many years.

DARMSTADT, GERMANY HERMANN KEYSERLING

127

TAGORE AND RUSSIA

O UR enemies very often accuse us of having “destroyed culture.” Meanwhile,
perhaps no nation shows such a strained attention to the world’s culture and
its greatest representatives as the delivered nations of the Soviet Union. In
1930, Rabindranath Tagore paid us a visit and could convince himself how our
workers respect and honour the great writer. In every place, where he showed
himself, he became the object of enthusiastic triumphs ; the auditoria where he spoke
were overcrowded with the public, thousands visited the exhibition of his pictures,
which was organised in Moscow, and we all remember how the enormous auditorium
of the Union House listened breathlessly to the great poet, reading his own poems ;
they listened with respect and admiration, feeling the beautiful music of the language
of Bengal, though not understanding the words, but feeling themselves in the
presence of a great soul.

It must have seemed that Tagore, avoiding all political struggle, absorbed in
his deep meditation, must be foreign to us and far away from our life, which is spent
in an atmosphere of stormy political discussions and feverish reconstructions. But
it is an error. A thinker, reflecting on the Eternal, and a Revolution full of to-day’s
interest and immediate problems, are not enemies. There is no rupture between
them, and somewhere high up on the last summit they will hold a friendly meeting.
Our revolution does not reject the hope of a “golden age,” of a future brotherhood
of humanity, the idea which during many thousand years animated all religions
and also the best representatives of humanity. The communist revolution has
traced on its banner the practical realisation of these ideals. The revolution is not
a destroyer, an enemy of noble thinkers. On the contrary, the proletariat looks upon
itself as the lawful heir who is called to translate these ideals into life. That is why
the songs of Tagore are resounding in our hearts as a beautiful call for liberation.
He is longing for God. “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure,” these
are the opening words of his Gitanjalu We have no mystics, our cravings are
limited by the boundaries of our planet, by organisations of a wise life of labour here
on earth. But when the great Hindu poet shows us the treasures of his soul, when
the old rags that cover the every-day man fall to pieces, when he describes, as nobody
else can, the rapture of longing for the Ideal, I am sure that it is the expression in
idealistic form of the joy of Creation which burns in the soul of each warrior of our
revolution, and each of our fighters feels the charm of these songs; he does not feel
them less deeply, because the longing of the poet for higher spheres goes over the
boundaries of our planet and we think its limits give us space enough. The nature
of the sublime is always the same; and all those who can rouse the sentiment of
elevation in man’s soul as Tagore does (and there are also our poets), they are the

128

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

singers of our sentiments and moods, because in the old world—in the world where all
idealistic impulses were stifled by the craving for gain and by cruel competition—
there is no more place for such sentiments.

Tagore is also very near and dear to us in another way. He is seeking his God
there where we seek ours. How often do I read over his splendid hymns (loth and
11 th) out of his Gitanjali; his allocution to God: “Pride can never approach to
where thou walkest in the clothes of the humble among the poorest and lowliest and
lost.”

“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads: Whom dost thou
worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine
eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

“He is there, where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path'
maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower and his garment
is covered with dust.. .

“Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What
harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by
him in toil and in the sweat of thy brow.”

We have in our country an army of many millions of men and women formed
out of those tillers and pathmakers. This army is fighting for the deliverance of
humanity.

The new labour country puts into practice those ideals that were the dream of
the best thinkers and poets, and the country looks at them as her own.

That is the reason of our enthusiastic welcome to Tagore.

I am very sorry not to know the language in which he wrote his songs, the
beauty of which I felt when listening to his inspired reading in the Column Hall
of the House of Union in Moscow. But even the pale reflection of his poetry in
translation into European languages shows the high flights of his soul, the greatness
of his thoughts, the sincerity and depth of his sentiments. In this Golden Book,
where his friends' greetings are gathered, I should wish to tell that in our country
we know and honour Tagore’s name, we have very good translations of his works,
and our toiling masses, only recently so oppressed through injustice and ignorance,
are now delivered and already united to culture. They are now occupied with the
great work of economical and cultural renewal of their country, and the quicker
this work will be accomplished, the nearer and dearer to us would be the names of
the great teachers of humanity, in whose constellation the name of Tagore burns
with such a fascinating bright light.

MOSCOW

P. S. KOGAN

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

T O millions in Asia India’s wealth of thought and spiritual ideal has, from early
times, exercised an influence which is hardly less than that of Greece in the
West. But for centuries Europe did not know anything about this fact.

India was considered to be a country where wealth could be accumulated and
where wondrous things were to be found. And it was the tales about such marvels
which chiefly interested the mind.

It was an Indian poet who at last opened the eyes of the West. Through
William Jones’ translation of Kalidasa’s Sakuntalu Europe came to know something
about India’s soul, about the ideals, the aims, and the aspirations of the people of
India. And this led to a keen interest in India, her history and civilization.

It was, however, chiefly ancient India which attracted the interest of the West.
Kalidasa was the poet, and the ancient seers and thinkers were the last and noblest
product of India’s genius.

Even when modern Indians came to play a role in the spiritual development
of the West, it was chiefly as interpreters of the wisdom of the past that they were
greeted and admired.

Then came the day when another Indian poet conquered the West. This time
it was not one of bygone times, but one who lived and sang in modern India, whose
tune was that of the Indian landscape, the Indian river, the Indian forest and the
Indian village of to-day.

Again the West listened, and marvelled. It found the same authentic beauty,
the same sublime flight of thought as in Kalidasa’s immortal works: the old spirit
was still alive.

Europe’s interest in India was renewed and strengthened. And now it was not
only directed towards the bygone poet, but often chiefly towards the living forces
that shape the modern India, towards the world of beauty and harmony which his
poems revealed, and towards the people to whose feelings and aspirations they gave
expression.

The consequence was an ever-growing interest and sincere sympathy. To-day
India has countless friends and well-wishers all over the world: he who bears the
Sun-god’s name has warmed the hearts towards his country and been her best
ambassador.

He has taught the world to look on India rvpt only as the source of an ancient
civilization and spiritual culture, but just as much as the home of living men and
women, whom we must love, and who belong to the same great human community
as we. India has come nearer to us. Our attitude has changed.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

As long as we were under the spell of India’s past, we could admire her old
achievements, sometimes in blind admiration, without understanding. We were
thankful for them, and we sometimes showed our gratitude in an attempt at giving
India a share in our own achievements. But few people believed that the India of
to'day could give us as much as we could give her.

Now we know that the Indian genius which gave the world the Vedas, the
Upanishads, the Bhagavad-gita, the inspired poets, is still alive, and that its voice
must be heard in the great concert where every nation has her own tune. Indians
and Europeans are brothers, living in the same world and the same time, and their
highest interests are inseparable.

We do not want to become Indians, and we do not want the Indians to become
Europeans in their mind and in other ways. But we want the East to join hands
with the West, in a noble contest for the promotion of the highest ideals, which are
common to the whole world.

We feel that Rabindranath Tagore has been our best guide towards this deeper
understanding. And we also feel that he, with his deep sympathy, will be able to
show the East, and above all India, that we are her brethren, and not her enemies.

We called him Guru Dev in Santiniketan. And he has become our Guru, He
has shown that oceans and continents cannot separate what is one: the human mind
in its longing for peace and harmony, for beauty and lofty ideals. Our hearts go
out to him, in gratitude, and in hope, the hope that he will long be able to continue
his noble work for mutual understanding and love. The world is in need of it.

OSLO, NORWAY STEN KONOW

GURUDEV

In the mould of his limitless genius all difEerent Arts become one:

He paints with words and plays with colours;

He draws with rythm and dances with thought;

His lines are philosophy, his ideas sculptures ;

He builds with dreams and teaches with silence.

Unveiled by him, Death’s mysterious image

reveals her misunderstood Beauty.

PARIS

ANDREE KARPELES

CONTRIBUTION OF NATIONALISM TO INTERNATIONALISM

M an is only one of several species of gregarious animals which get together
for various reasons, some for defence, some for aggression, some from a
social instinct. Seldom does man prefer isolation to group life. Association
of persons may form small groups or nations. The most simple and common unit
is a family, the adhesive force being love. From this, wider circles of tribes, com^
munities, castes and nations are formed. Being a good father does not preclude
one from being a good patriarch of a tribe or head of a community, or a leader of a
nation; on the other hand, it is the same attribute that makes a good father that
goes to make a good leader. The adhesive force that results in a nation is termed
nationalism. It is a form of social mind that pervades a whole group of people.

When animals get together for hunting, like a pack of wolves, their purpose is
aggression, and their motive selfish. The damage done by such a pack may be
wanton and the behaviour of the pack will be far more ferocious than the total
ferocity of the units composing the pack. In the same way, amongst human beings
nationalism may form the dynamic force for aggression and exploitation to satisfy
their own selfish greed. In this we find the worst manifestation of human nature,
and the ethical standard of a nation urged to action by the type of what may be
called Functional Nationalism is, as a rule, much lower than the standards of the
individuals forming the nation. The western nations of the present day are labouring
under the grip of such a degrading nationalism as this. Europe has always peopled
hunters and fishers, and their present nationalism discloses the origin of the purpose
for which they have clung together. The contribution of such a nationalism to
International affairs is strife, dissension and discord. It is this type of Nationalism
that Poet Rabindranath has in mind when he observes: “The political civilisation of
the west is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It
is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other
people and tries to swallow their whole future,” and feels that “the spirit of conflict
and conquest is at the origin and in the centre of western nationalism.” This insular
and virulent type of Nationalism has set nation against nation and has lowered man
below the level of brute beasts. It has directed Science into producing poison gas
and inventing methods of wholesale murder, and has degraded God-given talents to
gratify its insatiable rapacity. As the poet puts it; “The vital ambition of the present
civilization of Europe is to have the exclusive possession of the devil.” The
individuals composing the nation as a rule stand aghast at the achievements of their
own nation when they stop to reflect on the results. Such a functional nationalism
which is motivated by greed and selfishness is indeed a curse to humanity.

We find some animals get together, not because they are engaged in the same

132

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

venture on formation function, but because they belong to the same family, as in
the case of a herd of elephants, or a flock of sheep. We have a similar brotherly spirit
manifested in a form of nationalism, which v»e may call Ethnic Nationalism. This
is also somewhat exclusive, but it is not based on selfishness and usually the binding
factor is a common culture, religion, or birth. The best example of this type of
social mind is seen amongst the followers of the Prophet of Mecca. Their fellov/-
feelings are not circumscribed by caste or colour and transcends geographic and
economic barriers. Prince and peasant, black and white, Turk or Negro, all form
an universal brotherhood within the pale of one religion. Their love is all com¬
prehensive within its boundaries; outside the religion the brotherhood refuses to
function and forms the limitation to its approaching an internationalism which is so
eagerly sought for.

Then we come to the third type of Nationalism, which does not seek to gain
by another’s loss, has no predatory designs and is not limited in its operation. It
seeks to protect itself not by violence but by binding its constituents by regulations.
This type we may call Constitutional Nationalism. It is to be mostly found in
Asiatic countries. In our own land, the binding factor has expressed itself in the
caste system and in the rules and regulations attached to everyday conduct. Japan
has abandoned this constitutional nationalism and has adopted the functional
nationalism and so has been recognised as one of the Powers of Destruction to-day.
Baron Hayashi, formerly Japanese ambassador at Paris, says: “As long as we were
engaged in peaceful pursuit of arts and literature, we were despised as barbarians, but
as soon as we learnt the use of arms and the art of killing, we were hailed as civilised
and as equal of the Europeans.”

Constitutional nationalism, like the banks of a river keeps and conserves the
life-giving streams. Indian Nationalism to-day distributes the charkha, while western
nationalism is carrying out experiments in the manufacture of Poison Gas. In
ancient India, it was this type of nationalism that discouraged competition and formed
joint families and trade gilds to provide for all.

A nation that is consolidated by constitutional nationalism need fear no dis¬
integrating forces. It is due to this power that our society has withstood the storms
and ravages of centuries, while Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations have succumbed.
Having composed itself, the nation expands and is prepared to receive anybody.
India received all foreigners v.’ith open arms. Such nationalism is not exclusive, but,
if fully developed, will result in an international life which will usher in peace and
brotherhood. As C. R. Das said: “If Indian Nationalism is to live, it cannot afford
to isolate itself from other nations. We must have a home before we can receive
a guest. She (India) must vibrate with national life, and then we can talk of the
union of the two civilizations.” Gandhiji says: “Indian Nationalism is not exclusive,
nor aggressive, nor destructive. It is health-giving, religious, and therefore humani¬
tarian. India must learn to live before she can aspire to die for humanity.” We

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

find it is this type of nationalism that impels Gandhiji, who said before embarking
for England, in his parting message: “To me service of India is identical with the
service of humanity.” Nationalism like charity begins at home, but if it stops there,
it is not worth much. It has to reach out to all sorts and kinds of men all over the
globe. We cannot seek to develop an international mind without a foundation
of a strong national mind, “for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen,
how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?” Development of such a nationalism,
not based on selfish greed or avarice, nor limited to any particular belief or creed,
but one that is sure of its own grounds, and reaches out to the rest of humanity, can
only hasten the day when aU peoples will beat their swords into ploughshares and
their spears into pruning hooks: “Nations shall not lift up sword against nations,
neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine
and under his fig tree ; and none shall make them afraid,” and there will be “Glory to
God in the highest, and on earth Peace, Goodwill towards men.”

SABARMATI, AHMEDABAD JAGADISAN C. KUMARAPPA

ABINDANATH Tagore, grand Cygne de I’Orient et de I’Humanite, Prophete
T 3 visionnaire et Chanteur passionne de 1 ’ Unite et de la Realisation, Etoile douce
^ qui veille sur le monde tumultueux et sombre. Grand Ame qui s’accorde avec
la musique grandiose. Mystique de I’Univers sans fond, ainsi qu’avec celle des appels
tatonnants des larmes cachees dans les etres les plus humbles, sage Annonciateur de
I’harmonie naissante d’un avenir plus vaste, Sculpteur patient et pieux des ames
enfantines qui doivent etre les concitoyens des temps nouveaux. O Poete de I’eternel
printemps de Tame, par qui la raison reve et le reve se cristallise intellectuellement
en poesie et en action, en qui se reconcilent fraternellement les ideaux vivants de
rOrient et de I’Occident, O Poete-Homme, Rabindranath Tagore, votre voix est
parvenue, et parvient, au^dessus des murs aveugles de haines, de prejuges, toujours
melodieuse, puissante, parfois tremblante par suite de la tristesse paternelle, jusqu’a nos
coeurs; en vous remerciant, ils vous felicitent, du coeur de notre pays de I’Extreme-
Orient, qui gardent heureusement en souvenir votre figure lumineuse et meditative.

TOSHIHIKO KATAYAMA

134

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Manga ar ha forgatt sedan den dagen,
da jag horde Rabindranath Tagore saga tack for Nobelpriset,
men jag bevarar annu minnet av en hbgrest gestalt,
draperad i nagra lost fallande vader av gratt siden
och av ett ansikte av en underbar hbghet.

Nar man sag det bredvid andra ansikten

tycktes det utmejslat med vida stbrre omsorg och skicklighet.

En ande gegavad med en mera vaken skonhetstbrst

eller kanske med en tydligare hagkomst av det himmelska urhemmet,

an som vanligen beskares oss,

hade format denna kropp och detta huvud till sin jordiska boning.

Jag sag honom sta i en kateder i en vanlig fbrelasningssal.

Hbgtidskladda herrar och darner fyllde den till sista plats,

bverallt mbtte man bekanta ansikten,

inte ett bgonblick kunde man glbmma,

att man befann sig i Stockholm, i gamla Sverige.

Fbrelasaren sjalv talade engelska, en tydlig lattbegriplig engelska,

inte ett bgonblick kunde man glbmma,

att man befann sig i Europa, i Vasterlandet.

Men den frammande skalden bbrjade tala till oss,

och med nagra fa enkla ord

flyttade han oss bort till ett fjarran underland.

Jag vagar inte saga om det just var Indien,

Men det var ett land, som han bar i sitt hjarta.

Ett land av frid,

ett land utan oro, utan arelysten stravan,
utan jaktande maktbegar.

En himmelsk ro omgav oss.

135

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

vi vandrade utmed stranderna av langsamt glidande floder,
i ljumma stjarnenatter lyssnade vi till milda visdomsord,
och av skdna, lyckliga manniskor omskapades tillvaron
till valvilja och poesi.

Nar den dag kommer, den aviagsna, den efterlangtade,
da livet har n^itt sitt mal, da den stora harmonien ar uppnadd,
och den gamla paradisdrommen har blivit till vcrklighet,
d^t skola den tidens manniskor paminna sig den indiske siaren
s^isom en bland dem, som forberedde den goda framtiden,
siisom en bland dem som i osvikligt hopp
utrotade hatets giftblomster

for att i deras stalle utsd karleksapplen och fredsrosor.

STOCKHOLM SELMA LAGERLOF

TO TAGORE

I find it difficult to express through a foreign medium all I want to say about his
great personality. India through him has given proof to the world, of the
greatness of her religion, her philosophy and of her spiritual heritage.

Tagore was not educated in any of the modern Universities, in fact, he had a
dislike, when a youth, to modern schools and we may say that he educated himself
in the Nature’s school. True to the spirit and teachings of Hinduism, he has been
advocating absolute equality, equal rights and equal opportunities between the
sexes and his speeches and writings breathe a deep veneration and love for woman¬
kind. He believes that India’s redemption, nay, the redemption of the whole world
from greed and quarrels and the establishment of international Peace and Goodwill
is possible only with^the help of a refined, pure and devoted womanhood. Women
of the East and the West look upon him as their friend, champion and Guru.
Humanity is indebted to him for bringing nations and creeds together through his
school of international culture and through his song of love.

May he be blessed with a sound health so that he may see India free and happy.
MADRAS MUTHULAKSHMI

GITANJALI

W HEN I turn the pages of my Gitanjali, fragrant memories awake.

One of them brings to my mind a centre of fashion on the Riviera some
years before the War. The quality of its beauty was elusive, only to be
discovered in serenity by the spirit of discernment, rare in the cosmopolitan, over'
stimulated crowd of idle-rich. So I took as my companion when I walked, the
Poet’s volume. And now for me these two are inextricably mingled, the golden
sunlight of the South and his verse.

Another takes me back to a Bengali garden after sunset. I had been sitting
indoors alone with the Gitanjali, but, the garden called me and I roamed out into the
scented night, and found the darkness illumined by fireflies, the first I had seen
during my brief stay in India. Thenceforward the Poet’s lines have never been far
from my mind: ‘Thou hast pressed the signet on every fleeting moment.’

By contrast, the scene is a ramshackle old hall in a back street in East London
on a Sunday night. People from adjoining courts and alleys have gathered togethe"!*,
men and girls from adjacent factories, mothers from over'crowded one'roomed homes,
teachers, a musician or two and some intellectuals. They are in dead earnest, these
pale, eager'eyed men and women met together for worship. They are realists.
They know the desperate need the world is in. They know the snares of poverty
and of power. They have learnt how soon the most trusted leader may desert his
people, betray his trust, forsake the way of the Cross; the handful of silver may be
disguised now'a'days, exchanged for commodities not so easily recognised as a bribe.
They read together from the Gospels, they pray together in silence, and they study
the Sermon on the Mount. Then they hear about the beggar who expected much
from the visit of a king: ‘I thought the luck of my life had come at last.’ The
king asks the beggar for alms, whereon the man, hiding his bitter disappointment as
best he can, hands him a single grain of rice. But that night among the crusts in
his begging bowl he finds a single grain of gold. ‘I bitterly wept and wished that
I had had the heart to give thee my all.’ The Poet’s story reinforces the truth the
lowly worshippers have already learnt in the hard school of experience.

Together they repeat as a final prayer one of the Poet’s ‘Song Offerings’:
‘Life of my life, I would ever keep my body pure.’ Line by line they pray, each lovely
word making their aspiration more clear to their own minds. And as they return
to their sunless homes, their lives are gladdened and enriched by the wisdom of the
East.

KINGSLEY HALL, EAST END, LONDON

MURIEL LESTER

137

A great soul of an incomparably great nation.
NEW YORK

SINCLAIR LEWIS

Rabindranath Tagore’s life has been a noble example of disinterested service
to high ideals. I hope he will long be spared to see the new India he has so
largely helped to make self-conscious both free and happy.

LONDON HAROLD J. LASKI

138

TAGORE—WHAT HE MEANS TO ME

A touch of the Infinite—an echo from the deeps of Being, an illumined presence,
draped in flowing lines. As he walks, one feels the rhythm of his cosmic
union with the Unseen Mysteries of the Silent Things.

He is the human Stradivarius for Gods to play upon. Tones of the master
chords sing—we listen wrapt in wonder—^we become singers too.

His poems make one feel as though one were To-morrow, with a better, holier
growth.

His prose heals the wounds that ache and makes them whole again.

Once upon a time the writer, a strange child of tender years, found fear within
the walls of the school-room in the West. Later, as she read of Santiniketan, far
away in the Eastern clime, she felt comforted to know someone—somewhere—had
suffered as she, and in suffering, had builded a School where little men and women
could find a Master-Comrade, bending the delicate twigs towards the Sun. These
little green shoots are the men and women of to-day—they are the torch-bearers out of
the Greater India of the past to a Still Greater India, loosening her bleeding chains.
These are the Sons and Daughters, wallting the Way with the Master. He with
his song helps—when pain and grief and questioning come—to find the way back—
over There—beyond the Here.

Master, Thou art the Perfect Instrument,—sounding the plaintive notes . . .
it is the call to Brotherhood—the hymn of “Mother India and the World”, together,
walking together.

Sometimes I cry out, are Gods like this—this Presence all in white?

NEW YORK ALMA L. LISSBERGER

Friend of Us All:

T his is your seventieth year. It is also the hundredth year of electric power,
which we chiefly owe to Faraday. To speak of his discovery of electro¬
magnetic induction is to speak plain prose, but we who have faith in the
ultimate unity of poetry and science will celebrate Tagore in May and Faraday in
September. He is a great gift to the East, you are a great gift to the West, and
both are a great gift to the World.

He revealed depths of unused force, and you have revealed depths of unused
love. He cut fines of physical power and let it flow into our hands; you have cut
lines that divided men and let love flow into our hearts. By dynamo and cable he

139

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

has brought men nearer together, but you have reminded us that men who hate
each other are better sundered. He began the net'work of obedient fire that now
flashes round the earth ; you have given us the sanest words to send with utmost
speed. He could not give us a smaller world without increasing the dangers of
haste, but you have given us hope of world-wide sobriety. He increased material
wealth incredibly, but would take no penny of it for himself, and sadly summed up
the faults of men in three weighty words: deficiency of judgment. You have shown
us that respect for persons goes far to remove that deficiency, and convinced us that
reverence for persons renders judgment sound.

It was Faraday who first divined that there is a unit charge of electricity.
Though this was not discovered and measured till you were nearly fifty years of age,
we are now beginning to think in terms of this minutest charge, and to find beauty
where once we found but means to satisfy our greed. We lust far less for gold when
we find the tissue of earth all golden. To put it with the utmost literalness, the
actual tissue of earth is not unlike the tissue of the midnight sky, thick sown with
stars.

It was Faraday too who framed the first equation of organic chemistry, which
gives us at least the means of making life happier for all men, and now we are
beginning to read organisms in terms of electric units, till the human body itself seems
but a starry pattern within the starry whole. Here again poetry and science unite in
rendering it difficult to separate men from nature or from each other.

But never did Faraday pretend to solve by chemistry or by electricity the
inviolable secret of personality, and never did he question the love of the Person in
whom all persons may find their peace. No man would have been gladder than
Faraday to echo these words of yours: “It costs me nothing to feel that I am ; it is
no burden to me. And yet if the mental, physical, chemical, and other innumerable
facts concerning all branches of knowledge which have united in myself could be
broken up, they would prove endless. It is some untold mystery of unity in me, that
has the simplicity of the infinite and reduces the immense mass of multitude to a
single point."

If such words can thrill and comfort these who recognize the limits of scientific
method—words written in a language not your own and in the lowly harmony
of prose—how piercing sweet to native ears must be your native songs 1 If thus
you lift a burden in the West, who shall measure the burdens that you lift in the
East! And if in the West we dimly discern the beauty of the vision you unfold, how
brightly in the East must you reveal the vision of sunrise! May you live long! We
wish ourselves many happy returns of your day and yourself, for wherever you go on
earth you make life easier to live, and sweeter.

LEWIS INSTITUTE, CHICAGO

Ever yours,

EDWIN HERBERT LEWIS

140

A TAGORE

J E considere certains pages du Gitanjali comme les plus hautes, les plus profondes,
les plus divinement humaines qu’on ait ecrites jusqu’a ce jour.

BRUXELLES MAURICE MAETERLINCK

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

N IE v/erde ich den Tag vergessen. wo mein Mann mir Gitanjali brachte und wir
die ersten Lieder zusammen lasen. Es war wie ein Nachhausekommen—ich
weiss kein besseres Wort fur das begliickende seelische Heimatsgefuhl,—das
mich beim Lesen dieser herrlichen Psalmen durchstromte. Ein kbstliches Geschenk
nach dem andern kam von ihm zu uns heriiber: die glutvollen und doch lilienreinen
1 .iebeslieder des Gartners, die zarten und tiefen Gedichte vom Kinde, und dann die
weisheitsvollen Sammlungen der im Auslande gehaltenen Reden aus der Zeit des
grossen Krieges. Da war es, dass Rabindranath Tagore ganz zum Zentrum meines
Lebens wurde, dass ich meine Lehrarbeit niederlegte und mir die Obertragung und
Verbreitung seiner Werke in Deutschland zur Lebensaufgabe machte. Denn diese
Werke bergen in sich die Erfullung der tiefsten Sehnsucht der deutschem Volksseele,
—der Menschenseele uberhaupt.

Rabindranath Tagore, Du begnadetes Gefass Gottes, Du goldenes Buch der
Weisheit und Schdnheit, das Gott den Menschen schenkte, Du tausendfach Geseg-
neter, sei gegriisst.

WANDSBEK, GERMANY

HELENE MEYERTRANCK

RABINDRANATH AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONALITY

T he present age is witnessing a gigantic struggle between personality and
machine. The growth of Science and the industrial civilization resting upon
it have led to an apotheosis of the purely mechanical aspect of life. This
struggle has been described by Rabindranath as the struggle between Jack and the
Giant. Only the Giant here is not a “gigantic person but a multitude of men
turned into a gigantic system”. The tragedy that we are daily witnessing tO'day
is the tragedy of a vast soulless organization slowly eating up all humanity within us.

The present Western civilization appears to us to be an embodiment of this
soulless organization. Its very bigness is its most dangerous feature. Its impersonal
character is precisely what makes it so awful. Its abstract nature and its aloofness
smother all our humanity. The view that we obtain of its is “that of a Titanic
power with an endless curiosity to analyze and know, but without sympathy to
understand; with numberless aims to cover and acquire, but no serenity of soul to
realize and enjoy.”

It is sad to reflect that this soulless civilization is the creation of Science. For
Science in its inception is not soulless. It is, on the contrary, distinctly spiritual in
its aim. For it is animated by nothing else than a pure love of truth, the most
spiritual of all the possessions of man. The motive force which drove a Galileo or
Newton is essentially the same as that which moved a Buddha or a Shankara.

Science as Science, therefore, is not to be condemned. If Science is to be
suppressed, then the noblest activity of man, the disinterested service of truth, will
disappear. No poet or philosopher worth the name has ever proposed any such thing.
Rabindranath will be the last person on earth to be a party to it. Yet nobody can
be blind to the evils which the progress of Science has brought in its train. They
are so palpable that nobody can ignore them. Everyday we feel them, every hour
we realize their presence.

The fault of Science, then, does not lie in its aim but in its method. Its method
is the impersonal method of abstraction. It has carried the principle of disinterested¬
ness to such an extent that it has banished all human interest out of its sphere. Its
method has coloured (or rather discoloured) its conception of truth. For truth comes
out of its hands a mere slteleton, a spectral form which has carefully left all its
substance behind.

If modern civilization, therefore, is to be saved, the impersonal method of
Science must give way to one in which Personality plays the dominant part. If
human culture is not to come to an end, then the force of personality must be allowed
to break through the barriers of abstraction.

This is the message of Rabindranath. This is also the substance of Bergson's
teaching. This is, moreover, the central theme of the philosophy of values, as well
as of that movement led by Alfred Fouillee and Emile Boutroux and known as the

142

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

French philosophy of freedom. Rabindranath has joined here all the great construe'
tive forces that are ranged against the impersonal worship of abstract symbols. If
the world is to be made safe for humanity, it is essential that Personality and not
abstract mechanism should be made the dominant note of civilization.

This is the substance of Tagore’s protest against the soulless mechanical civiliza-
tion of the present age, as well as of his vindication of the philosophy of Life, as we
find it in the Cycle of Spring and the Crane. In the Cycle of Spring the
principle of Life appears as the Spirit of Youth which makes short work of disease
and decrepitude. It appears as the maddening south wind, the herald of youth and
joy:

O South Wind, the Wanderer, come and rock me.

Rouse me into the rapture of new leaves.

I am the wayside bamboo tree, waiting for your breath

To tingle life into my branches.

It is the fire of April which

.leaps from forest to forest.

Flashing up in leaves and flowers, ^

from all nooks and corners.

•

It is the "rushing river as it runs splashing from its mountain cave”.

“Haven’t you noticed the detachment of the rushing river, as it runs splashing from
its mountain cave? It gives itself away so swiftly, and only thus it finds itself. What
is never-changing, for the river, is the desert sand, where it loses its course.”

The play ends with the triumph of life, with the victory of youth over old age:

The Song of Burdens dropped.

Do you own defeat at the hand of Youth ?

Yes.

Have you met at last the ageless Old,

Who ever grows new?

Yes.

Have you come out of the walls that crumble
and bury those whom they shelter?

Yes.

{Another group sings );

Do you own defeat at the hands of life?

Yes.

Have you passed through death to stand
at last face to face with the Deathless?

Yes.

Have you dealt the blow to the demon dust
that swallows your City Immortal ?

Yes.

143

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

And the closing words o£ the last scene of the play are perhaps the most
glorious vindication of Youth and Life that exists in any literature.

April is awake,

Life’s shoreless sea
is heaving in the sun before you.

All the losses are lost,

and death is drowned in its waves,

Plunge into the deep without fear,

with the gladness of April in your heart.

In the Crane the Spirit of Life becomes definitely the Vital Urge which is the
underlying reality not only of human nature but of the whole universe. Its nature
is best represented by a ceaselessly flowing river: —

O river, vast and free,

Thy viewless waters rush and sweep.

Resistless, deep.

In silence ceaselessly.

The great void shivers at thy fierce and formless speed.

The dash terrific of thy currents breed
Glittering foam in heaps and clustered rings
That live as Things ;

Life bursts in dazzling gleams, in coloured streak and spark,

Through the hurrying dark.

On whirling eddies’ edge are spun.

Like bubbles, moon and star and sun.

O mighty Amazon, O Titan dame.

The wordless cadence of thy being
Is thine own journeying
Without an end, without an aim

And just as Bergson says that Matter arises as soon as the movement of life is
checked, so the poet says that as soon as the flow of the river is checked, there arises a

“mountain'heap of things":

If in a moment’s mood
Of lassitude

Thou stoppest on thy path.

The Universe, in sudden wrath.

Would bulk gigantic with its mountain heap of things.

In the Waterfall the conflict of the Universe becomes more definitely the
struggle between life and mechanism. The engineer Vibhuti wants to curb the free
flow of the river by erecting embankments, and the people destroy the embankments
and allow the river to reassert itself. Vibhuti had to bow before the Spirit of Life.
mechanism had to retreat before the triumphant march of the vital spirit.

144

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORS

It is, however, in the Red Oleanders that the Vital Urge takes the distinct form
of Personality. The struggle depicted here is the struggle between personality
and machine. Nandini, the heroine, represents concrete personality, and there is
ranged against her the abstraction called industrial civilization, represented by the
King. It is significant that the King is described as a Voice, for he is nothing
but a bare abstraction. The theme of the drama, as the poet himself has described
it, is as follows: “Nandini, the heroine, represents a concrete personality. She is
pursued by the abstraction, known as the King.” “Nandini is a real woman who
knows that wealth and power are may a, and that the highest expression of it is in
love, which she manifests in this play in her love for Ranjan. But love-ties are
ruthlessly molested by megalomaniac ambition, while an acquisitive intellect plies its
psychological curiosity, probing into the elusive mystery of love through vivisection. ’

But Personality in its most concrete form is here conceived as feminine. As the
poet says: “This personality—the divine essence of the infinite in the vessel of the
finite—has its last treasure-house in woman’s heart.” Here the poet comes very close
to the conception of Goethe, who similarly speaks of the guiding principle of the
universe as feminine: “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hienan.” The poet believes
that the pervading influence of woman will some day restore the human to the
desolated world of man. “The joy of this faith,” he says, “has inspired me to pour
all my heart into painting against the background of black shadows—the nightmere
of a devil’s temptation—the portrait of Nandini as the bearer of the message of reality,
the saviour through death.”

It is significant that the poet believes that in the heart of mechanism there is
installed a power that can emancipate us from mechanism. He has compared
mechanism to a tired mountain. There is a trepidation within, a slowly moving
process of disintegration, as a result of which the gigantic mountain will gradually
crumble down and slip into the valley. This is how Personality will re-assert itself .
Mechanism, therefore, is a temporary eclipse of Personality and will disappear before
the incoming tide of Personality.

The parallelism here between the poet’s thought and that of Bergson is remark¬
able. Bergson believes that it is when the Life-force suffers a check that mechanism
makes its appearance. Mechanism, however, disappears again with the restoration of
the Life-force. It, therefore, represents only a temporary slowing down or retardation
of the Vital Urge.—Why the Vital Urge should suffer a retardation, even of a
temporary nature, has not, however, been sufficiently well explained by Bergson. In
place of explanations he has only given us illustrations. One illustration which he
has given is that of a vase from which jets of vapour come out, which, however,
gradually condense and come down in the form of minute water-particles. In a
similar manner, he says, the movement of life, after proceeding for some time, slows
down and ultimately is reversed.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

It is in this faith in the ultimate triumph of Personality that the mysticism of
Rabindranath lies. The central idea of this mysticism which runs through the
plays, Post Office, King of the Dark Chamber, Cycle of Spring, Waterfall
and Red Oleanders is that there is an irresistible force shaping the course of the
world, fighting and conquering mechanism. To the rule of law, which apparently
seems to be the last word of Science, there is opposed a force which, though invisible,
is gigantic. This force is the force of Personality. Science tries to crush it, but it
refuses to be crushed.

Nandini. What is it you see in me?

Voice. The dance rhythm of the All.

Nandini. I do not understand.

Voice. The rhythm that lightens the enormous weight of matter. To that rhythm
the bands of stars and planets go about dancing from sky to sky, like so many minstrel
boys. It is that rhythm, Nandini, that makes you so simple, so perfect.

This force of Personality strikes at the very root of soulless mechanism. Hence
the desperate efforts of the latter to smother Personality.

Voice. The hidden mystery of life, wrenched away by me, bewails its torn ties. To
get fire from a tree you have to burn it. Nandini, there is fire within you, too, red fire.
One day I shall burn you and extract that also.

Nandini. Oh, you are cruel!

Voice. I must either gather or scatter. I can feel no pity for what I do not get.
Breaking is a fierce kind of getting.”

"Breaking is a fierce kind of getting.” It is the desperation of autocratic power
when it is haunted by a sense of its weakness.

In this struggle of mechanised autocracy with Personality, the latter triumphs.
Autocracy is from the beginning conscious of its emptiness. Thus the Voice says
to Nandini; "I, who am a desert, stretch out my hand to you, a tiny blade of
grass, and cry: T am parched, I am bare, I am weary.’ ” The very wealth of
natural resources reveals their essential hollowness. The King is fully conscious that
in spite of his absolute power, or rather on account of it, there is lurking within him
an essential weakness.

Voice. All I possess is so much dead weight. No increase of gold can create a particle
of a touchstone, no increase of power can ever come up to youth.

Again—

Voice. Shall I explain ? Underground there are blocks of stone, iron, gold—there
you have the image of strength. On the surface grows the grass, the flower blo.ssoms—
there you have the play of magic. I can extract gold from the fearsome depths of secrecy,
but to wrest that magic from the near at hand I fail.

On the other hand, Nandini is fully conscious of her strength. When asked
by the King whether she is not afraid of him, she replies with an emphatic "No.”

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The iron fortress of autocracy falls like a house of cards at the very touch of
Personality. The King himself goes out in quest of the “Secret of Life” and hears
the call of Nandini. The body of Ranjan is found lying on the road. And there
is found the red streak which is the marriage tie of Nandini and Ranjan. And in
the dust lies Nandini’s wristlet of red oleanders. What a union and what a death
is this! It is in this tragic manner that the lifc'Stream bursts through the network
of rules.

This tragedy is the tragedy of Life. The keynote of Life is not sacrifice but
conquest. This is why Fichte said that the world is not given but surrendered
(“Die Welt ist nicht gegeben, sondern auf-gegeben”). There can be no truce with
the reign of law. What is necessary is a root-and-branch work that will destroy
the whole machinery of soulless rules. This eternal conflict between Life and dead
rules is the source of all movement. You may call it original evil if you like, but
it is the fundamental motive force of the universe.

In his Hibbert lectures on The Religion of Man, the poet has shown the
same principle of Personality in its creative aspect, as the guiding thread of human
evolution. The evolution of Man is the evolution of creative Personality. Man
alone has the courage of standing against the biological laws. His erect posture
itself is an adventure. When every possible biological advantage was on the side
of his following the orthodox method of walking on all fours, he chose a new method
of progression for himself. This is his first great experiment and the whole of his
subsequent evolution is a continuous series of experiments in breaking established
rules. It is here that his Personality reveals itself. As human evolution, however,
hardens into civilization, the elastic force of Personality is more or less obscured by
the artificial standards that civilization sets up. It is then that human tragedy begins.
Our real tragedy, therefore, lies not “in the risk of our material security but in the
obscuration of Man himself in the human world.”

Oswald Spengler also in his celebrated book. The Decline of the West, speaks
of the hardening of culture into civilization. When culture loses its vitality, when
it stiffens into rigid forms, it passes into civilization. Civilization, therefore, is a
diseased or degenerate form of culture. Rabindranath’s protest against the tendencies
of modern civilization is quite as strong as that of Spengler. He has, however, faith
in the ultimate triumph of Personality over Science. Science will lead slowly but
steadily to its own self-redemption. This is what he means when in the Red Oleanders
he compares the present mechanical civilization to a tired mountain. The present
civilization is a necessary preparation for a higher civilization, resting upon Creative
Personality. Moreover, with all its faults, the poet believes that the present age is
better than the ages that have preceded it. He would, therefore, be the last person
to raise the cry: “Back to the mediaeval ages.”

THE UNIVERSITY, BENARES SISIR KUMAR MAITRA

147

DAS BUNTE KLEID

N ight, wie vorgesehen, zu den Erntearbeiten, sondern schom zur Nacht des
Fruhjahrsvollmonds kehrten die Lea^Sdhne Hals iiber Kopf von den Weiden
Schekems nach Hebron zuriick. Sie kamen angeblich, urn das Pesach^Schaf
mit dem Vater zu essen und mit ihm den Mond zu beobachten, in Wirklichkeit
aber, weil sie eine aufregende, alle Bruder nahe angehende Nachricht empfangen
batten, von deren Wahrheit sie sich unbedingt sofort an Ort und Stelle mit eigenen
Augen iiberzeugen mussten, ob nun etwas daran zu andern war order nicht. Die
Sache war dermassen wichtig und erschreckend, dass die Sdhne der Magde nichts
Eiligeres zu tun gehabt batten, als einen der Ibren abzuordnen und ibm die viertagige
Reise von Hebron nacb Scbekem zuzumuten, nur damit er den Fernen die Kunde
bringe. Selbstverstandlicb batte man Napbtali, den Gelaufigen, mit der Botscbaft
betraut. Im Grunde war es, die Scbnelligkeit angebend, ganz gleicbgultig, wer
reiste. Aucb Napbtali ritt zu Esel, und ob ein Paar langcr oder kurzer Beine an
den Seiten des Esels berunterbingen, macbte genau genommen nicbts aus: der Weg
nabm jedenfalls ungefabr vier Tage in Anspruch. Aber Napbtali, Bilbas Sobn, war
es nun einmal, mit dessen Person die Vorstellung der Gelaufigkeit verbunden war ;
die Rolle des Boten war nacb feststebender Obereinkunft die seine; und da aucb
seine Zunge gelaufig war, so traf scbon zu, dass wenigstens im letzten Augenblick
die Bruder durcb ihn den Sacbverbalt etwas scbneller erfabren wiirden, als durcb
einen anderen.

Was war gescbeben? Jaakob batte dem Joseph ein Gescbenk gemacbt.

Das war nicbts Neues. Dem “Lamm", dem “Reis", dem “Himmelsknaben",
dem Sobn der Jungfrau", oder wie die eigensinnig gefiiblvollen vaterlicben
Bezeicbnungen fur den Steineleser nun lauteten, war von jeber unter der Hand
an Sondergaben und zartlicben Aufmerksamkeiten, an bubscben Tbpferstucken,
Huldsteinen, Purpurscbniiren, Skarabaen dies und Jenes zugekommen, was dann die
Bruder mit finsteren Brauen in seinem lassigen Besitz saben, und um was sie sicb
verkiirzt fanden ; an Ungerecbtigkeit, eine grundsatzlicbe und fast lebrbaft betonte
Ungerecbtigkeit, batten sie Musse gebabt, sicb zu gewbbnen. Dies aber war ein
Gescbenk von erscbreckender Art und eines, wie zu befiircbten stand, entscbeidenden
Sinnes ; es bedeutete einen Stoss vor den Kopf fur sie alle.

Hier ist der Hergang. Es war Zeltwetter, die Spatregen waren in Gang ge'
kommen. Jaakob batte sicb nacbmittags in sein “barenes Haus" zuriickgezogen,
dessen verfilztes Gewebe, scbwarz, aus Ziegenbaar, uber feste Stangen gespannt
und mit starken Seilen an den gerammten Pflbcken befestigt, vollkommenen und
sicberen Scbutz vor der Segensnasse bot. Es war das grosste der ziemlicb weit verteilten
Siedlung, und als reicber Mann, der darauf hielt, den Frauen ein eigenes Obdacb zu
bieten, bewobnte der Herr es allein, obgleich es durcb ein an den mittleren Pfablen

148

RS R STUDENT IN LONDON

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

von vorn nach hinten hindurchgezogenes Geh’ange in zwei Raume geteilt war. Der
einc diente als Privat-Magazin und Vorratskammer: Kamel'Sattel und Taschcn,
unbenutzte Teppichc in gerolltem und zusammengelegten Zustande, Handmiihlen
und anderes Gerat lagen umher, und Schlauche mit Getreidc. Butter, Trinkwasser
und aus eingeweichten Datteln gckeltertem Palmwein waren aufgehangt.

Die andere Abteilung war der Wohnraum des Gesegneten und zeigte im
Verhaltnis zu der halbbeduinisch lockeren Lebensform, an der er festhielt, viel
Wohnlichkeit. Jaakob brauchte diese. Seine Ablehnung dauernder Bindung
durchs Stadtische hinderte nicht, dass cr einigen Behagens bedurfte, wenn er sich zu
Betrachtung und denkerischer Gottesarbeit vor der Welt in sein Eigenstes zuriickzog.
Auf der Vorderseite in Manneshbhe often, war der Boden des Gemachs mit Filz und
dariiber noch mit Teppichen in Buntwirkarbeit warm bedeckt, von denen andere
sogar die Wandgehange iiberkleideten. Ein Bettlager, mit Decken und Kissen
belegt, aus Zedernholz, stand auf erzenen Fussen, im Hintergrunde. Mehrere
T'onlampen auf verzierten Untersatzen, flache schalen mit Schnauzen fiir die Dochte,
brannten bier immer, denn armselig und cinem Gesegneten nicht anstandig ware es
gewesen, im Dunklen zu schlafcn, und auch bei Tage unterhielt die Bedienung
immer das 01, damit nicht eine Redensart, die schlimmen Untersinn fiihrte,
auch nur im eigentlichen Sinn anwendbar wiirde und man nicht sagen konne, Jaakobs
Lampe sei erloschen. Bemalte Henkelkriige aus Kalkstein standen auf dem flafhen
Deckel einer Truhe aus Sykomoren-Holz, deren Wande mit blau glasierten Tone in-
lagen geschmiickt waren. Der Deckel einer anderen geschnitzten und beschriebenen
Truhe auf hohen Beinen dagegen war gewblbt. Es fehlte nicht an einem gliihenden
Kohlenbecken im Winkel, da Jaakob zum Frbsteln neigte. Stuhlhocker waren
vorhanden, dienten aber selten zum Sitzen, sondern vielmehr zum Abstellen von
Gebrauchsdingen. Ein kleiner Raucherturm stand auf einem, aus dessen fensterar'
tigen Offnungen feine, nach Zimmet, StyraX'Gummi und Galbanum duftende
Rauchwolken hervorkrauselten; ein anderer trug einen Gegenstand, der von der
Wohlhabenheit des Besitzers zeugte: ein wertvolles kunstgewerbliches Stiick
phbnizischer Herkunft, golden, eine flache Schale auf zierlichem Untergestell, das
dort, wo man es mit dec Hand anfasste, eine musizierende Frauenfigur zeigte.

Jaakob selbst sass mit Joseph in der Nahe des Eingangs auf Polstern an einem
niedrigen Taburett, auf dessen gravierter Bronzeplatte das Brettspiel aufgeschlagen
war. Er hatte den Sohn zu diesem Zeitvertreib, bei dem friiher Rahel seine
Gegenspielerin gewesen war, zu sich gerufen. Draussen rauschte auf Olbaume,
Busch und Stein der Regen nieder, der nach Gottes Gnade dem Korn des Tales die
Feuchtigkeit verlieh, die es brauchte, um die Sonne des Friihsommers bis zum
Schnitt zu ertragen. Der Wind klapperte leicht mit den Holzringen am Zelttuch,
an denen die Spannseile befestigt waren.

Joseph liess den Vater im Spiele gewinnen. Er war absichtlich ins Feld “Bbser
Blick” geraten und dadurch so in Riickstand und Nachteil gekommen, dass Jaakob zu

149

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

seiner angenehmen Oberraschung—denn er hatte mit grosser Unaufmerksamkeit
gespielt—, ihn schliesslich schlug. Er gestand seine Zerstreutheit ein, und dass das
Gliick mehr Anteil an diesem Ende gehabt babe, als sein Scharfsinn.

“Warest du nicht so zeitig zu Fall gekommen, Kind,” sagte er, “so hatte ich
notwendig unterliegen miissen, denn meine Gedanken schweiften ab, und ich babe
zweifellos schwere Fehler begangen, du aber hast sinnreich gezogen und nichts
versaumt, dein Missgeschick wieder gut zu machen. Deine Art zu spielen erinnert
sehr an Mamis, die mich so oft in die Enge trieb. Sowohl ihre Art, beim Nachdenken
den kleinen Finger zu beissen wie auch gewisse Listen und Kunstgriffe, die sie liebte,
erkenne ich zu meiner Riihrung bei dir weider.”

“Was hilft’s?” antwortete Joseph und reckte sich, indem er den Kopf zuriick-
legte, einen Arm zur Seite streckte und den anderen zur Schulter bog. “Der
Ausgang spricht gegen mich. Da das Vaterchen obsiegte bei zerstreuten Gedanken,
wie ware es dem Kind wohl ergangen, hatte es deine voile Aufmerksamkeit gegen
sich gehabt? Der Gang ware rasch zu Ende gewesen.”

Jaakob lachelte. “Meine Erfahrung,” sagte er, “ist die altere und meine Schule
die beste, denn schon als Knabe habe ich mit Jizchak gespielt, deinem Grossvater
meinerseits, und spater gar oft mit Laban, deinem Grossvater vonseiten der Lieblichen,
im Lande Naharin, jenseits der Wasser, der ebenfalls ein Spieler von zaher Oberle-
gung war.”

Auch er hatte Jizchak und Laban mehr als einmal absichtlich gewinnen lassen,
wenn es ihm um ihre gute Laune zu tun gewesen war, kam aber nicht darauf, dass
nun Joseph es so gemacht haben kbnnte.

“Es ist wahr,” fuhr er fort, “dass ich es heut habe fehlen lassen. Wiederholt
iiberkam mich ein Sinnen, das mich den Stand der Steine vergessen Hess, und siehe,
es gait dem Fest, das sich nahert, und der Opfernacht, die herankommt, da wir das
Schaf schlachten nach Sonnenuntergang und tauchen den Ysopbiischel ins Blut, um
die Pfosten damit zu bestreichen, damit der Wiirger voriibergehe. Denn es ist die
Nacht des Voriibergehens und der Verschonung um des Opfers willen, und ist das
Blut an den Pfosten dem Umhergehenden eine Beschwichtigung und ein Zeichen,
dass der Erstling geopfert ist zur Versohnung und zum Ersatz fiir Menschen und
Vieh, die es ihn zu wurgen geliistet, Daruber fiel ich mehrfach in Sinnen, denn der
Mensch tut manches, und siehe, er weiss nicht, was er tut. Wiisste und bedachte
er’s aber, so mbchte es sein, dass sich das Eingeweide ihm unwendete und ihm das
Unterste zuoberst kame in Obelkeit, wie mir’s mehrmals im Leben erging, namlich
zum zweitenmal, da ich erfuhr, dass Laban zu Sinear iiberm Prath einstmals sein
erstgebornes Sbhnchen geschlachtet habe als Darbringung und es in einer Kruke
beigesetzt habe im Fundament zum Schutze seines Hauses. Meinst du aber, es
hatte ihm Segen gebracht? Nein, sondern Unsegen, Fluch und Lahmung und ware
nicht ich gekommen und hatte ein wenig Leben verbreitet in Haus und Wirtschaft,
so hatte alles in Triibsal gestockt, und nie wieder ware er fruchtbar geworden in

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seinem Weibe Adina. Und doch hatte Laban das Sdhnchen nicht eingemauert,
wenn es nicht Altvorderen vor ihm Segen gebracht hatte in anderen Zeiten.”

“Da sagst du es,” antwortete Joseph, der die Hande im Nacken gefaltet hatte,
und machst mir klar, wie sich das begab. Laban handelte nach iiberstandigem
Branch und beging schweren Fehler damit. Denn es ekelt den Herrn das Ober-
standige, woriiber er mit uns hinaus will und schon hinaus ist, und er verwirft’s und
verflucht's. Darum, hatte Laban sich au£ den Herrn und au£ die Zeiten verstanden.
so hatte er an Stelle des Knableins ein Zicklein geschlachtet und mit dem Blute
Schwelle und P£osten bestrichen, so ware er angenehm gewesen, und sein Rauch
ware gerade aufgestiegen gen Himmel.”

“Da sagst nun du es wieder,” erwiderte Jaakob, “und nimmst mir den Gedanken
vorweg und das Wort vom Munde. Denn den Wiirger gelustet’s nicht nur nach
dem Vieh, sondern auch nach des Menschen Blut, und nicht nur in Ansehung der
Herde beschwichtigen wir seine Gier durch das Blut des Tiers an den P£osten, sowie
durch das Opfermahl, das wir abhalten griindlich und eilig bei der Nacht, damit bis
zum Morgen nichts iibrig bleibe vom Braten. Was £ur ein Braten ist das, wenn
man’s besinnt, und biisst wohl das Lamm nur fur die Herde, da wir es schlachten?
Was wiirden wir schlachten und essen, wenn wir tbricht waren, wie Laban, und was
ist geschlachtet worden und gegessen in unflatigen Zeiten? Wissen wir also, was
wir festlich tun, wenn wir essen, und miisste uns nicht, wenn wir’s bedachten, das
Unterste zuoberst kommen, so dass wir erbrachen?”

“Lass uns tun und essen,” sagte Joseph mit leichtsinnig hoher Stimme und
schaukelte sich in seinen gefalteten Handen. “Branch und Braten sind wohl-
schmeckend, und sind sie eine Losung, so Ibsen auch wir uns frbhlich damit vom
Unflat, indem wir uns au£ den Herrn verstehen und au£ die Zeiten! Siehe, da ist ein
Baum,” rie£ er und wies mit ausgestreckter Hand ins Innere des Zeltes, als ware dort
zu sehen, wovon er sprach, “prachtig in Stamm und Krone, von den Vatern gepflanzt
zur Lust der Spaten, Seine Wipfel regen sich funkelnd im Winde, da seine Wurzeln
im Stein und Staube haften des Erdreichs, tief im Dunkeln. Weiss wohl auch der
heitere Wipfel viel von der kotigen Wurzel? Nein, sondern ist mit dem Herrn
hinausgekommen iiber sie, wiegt sich und denkt nicht ihrer. Also ist’s meines
Bedunkens mit Branch und Unflat, und dass die fromme Sitte uns schmecke, bleibe
das Unterste nur hiibsch zuunterst.”

“Lieblich, lieblich, dein Gleichnis,” sprach Jaakob mit Kopfnicken und strich
sich den Bart, indem er ihn von den Seiten zusammenfasste und ihn durch die holile
Hand streichen Hess, “witzig und wohl erfunden! Das hindert nicht, das s notwendig
bleibt das Sinnen, sowie das Sorgen und die Beunruhigung, die Abrams Teil waren
und unser Teil sind je und je, damit wir uns Ibsen von dem, woriiber der Herr hinaus^
will mit uns und vielleicht schon hinaus ist, das ist die Sorge. Sage doch an: Wer
ist der Wurger, und was ist sein Vorubergehen? Geht nicht der Mond in der Nacht
des Festes voll und schbn durch den Pass, der da ist der Nord-und Scheitelpunkt

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

seines Weges, woselbst er sich wendct in seiner Fiille? Aber der Nordpunkt ist
Nergals, des Morders; sein ist die Nacht, Sin regiert sie fiir ihn, Sin ist Nergal bei
diesem Fest, und der Wiirger, der voriibergeht, und den wir versdhnen, das ist der
Rote/'

“Offenbar,” sagte Joseph. “Wir bedenken’s kaum, doch er ist’s.”

“Dies ist die Beunruhigung/’ fuhr Jaakob fort, “die mich zerstreute beim Spiel.
Denn es sind die Gestirne, die uns das Fest bestimmen, Mond und Roter, die die
Vertauschung eingehen in dieser Nacht, und tritt dieser an jenes Stelle. Sollen wir
aber den Gestirnen Kusshande werfen und ihre Geschichten feiern? Miissen wir
uns nicht gramen um den Herrn und die Zeit, ob wir uns denn auch noch auf sie
verstehen und uns nicht versiindigen an beiden, da wir sie festhalten durch trage
Gewohnheit beim Unflat, ixber den sie hinauswollen? Ich frage mich ernstlich, ob
es nicht meine Sache ware, unter den Unterweisungsbaum zu treten und die Leute
zusammcnzurufen, dass sie meine Sorgen vcrnahmen und anhorten meine Bedenken
in Sachen des Festes Pesach."

“Mein Vaterchen,” sagte Joseph, indem er sich verbeugtc und seine Hand neben
dem Brett, das seine Niederlage zeigtc, auf die Hand des Alten legte, “ist von allzu
genauer Seele, man muss ihn bitten, sich davon nicht zur Obertreibung bewegen zu
lassen und zur Zerstbrung. Darf sich das Kind als befragt ansehen, so rat es, das
Fest zu schonen und es nicht eifernd anzutasten um seiner Geschichten willen, fur
welche vielleicht mit der Zeit eine andere eintreten kbnnte, die du alsdann erzahlst
beim Bratenmahl; beispielsweise die Bewahrung Isaaks, die sehr passend ware, oder
aber wir warten ab in der Zeit, ob nicht Gott sich einmal durch eine grosse Errettung
und Verschonung verherrliche an uns, — die legen wir dann dem Fest zugrunde als
seine Geschichte und singen Jubellieder. Sprach der Torichte wohltuend?”

“Balsamisch," erwiderte Jaakob. “Sehr king und trbstlich, was ich eben in dem
Worte ‘balsamisch’ zusammenfasse. Denn du sprachst fur den Branch und zugleich
fiir die Zukunft, das sei dir angerechnet zu Ehren. Und sprachst fiir ein Verharren,
das dennoch ein Unterwegssein ist, darob lacht dir meine Seele zu, Joseph-el, du Reis
aus zartestem Stamm, — lass dich kiissen!"

Und er nahm Josephs schonen Kopf iiber dem Spielbrett zwischen seine Hande
und kiisste ihn, grundglucklich in seinem Besitz.

“Wenn ich nur wusste," sagte Joseph, “woher mir Klugheit kommt zu dieser
Stunde und der geringstc Scharfsinn, der Weisheit meines Herrn damit zu
begegnen im Gesprach! Sagtest du, deine Gedanken, seien abgeschweift beim Spiel,
so taten’s, offen gestanden, meine nicht minder; Immer nach einer Seite schweiften
sie von den Steinen weg, und die Elohim wissen, wie mir’s gelang, mich auch nur
so lange zu halten,"

“Wohin denn, Kindchen, gingen deine Gedanken?”

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“Ach”, erwiderte der Junge, “du erratst es leicht. Ein Wort juckt mich im
Ohre Tag und Nacht, das das Vaterchen kiirzlich zu mir sprach am Brunnen; das
hat mir die Ruhe geraubt, so dass die Neugier mich plagt, wo ich gehe und stehe,
denn es war ein Wort der Verheissung.”

Jaakob errbtete* und Joseph sah es. Es war eine leichte, rosige Rote, die in die
feine Greisenhagerkeit seiner Wangen emporstieg, und seine Augen triibten sich in
sanfter Verwirrung.

“Wie denn, es war nichts”, sagte er abwehrend. “Umsonst macht das Kind
sich Gedanken. Es war unbedeutend dahingesagt, ohne feste Meinung und Absicht,
Schenke ich dir nicht dies und das, wann's das Herz mich heisst? Nun denn, einzig
so war’s gemeint, dass ich dir irgendein schmuckes Ding zu gelegener Stunde ...”

“Nichtsda, nichtsdal” rief Joseph, sprang auf und umschlang den Vatcr.
“Dieser Weise und Gute sagt nichts unbedeutend dahin, das ware das Neuestel Als
ob ich’s ihm nicht angesehen hatte beim Sprechen klar und deutlich, dass er mitnichtcn
ins Leere sprach, sondern ein Ding im Auge hatte, bestimmt und schbn, nicht
irgendeines, — ein Besonderes und Herrliches, und dachte mir’s zu. Aber nicht
zugedacht nur hast du mir’s, sondem zugesagt und verheissen. Soli ich nicht wissen,
was mein ist und was mich erwartet? Scheint es dir glaubhaft, ich konnte Ruhe
finden und konnte dir Frieden geben, eh’ ich’s weiss?”

“Wie du mich drangst und bedrangst!” sagte der Alte in seiner Not. “Schiittle
mich nicht und nimm die Hande doch von den lappchen meiner Ohren, dass es
nicht aussieht, als sprangest du mit mir urn! Wissen — du magst es wissen, warum
nicht, ich sage dir’s und gebe zu, dass ich Eines im Sinne hatte, nicht dies oder jenes.
Here denn, lass dich zu Boden! Weisst du von Rahels Ketonet passim?”

“Ein Gewandstiick von Mami? Etwa ein Festkleid? Ah, ich verstehe, willst
du mir aus ihrem Kleide . .

“Hbre, Joseph! Du verstehst nicht. Lass dich belehren. Da ich gedient um
Rahel sieben Jahre, und der Tag herankam, dass ich sie empfangen sollte im Herrn,
sprach Laban zu mir; ‘Einen Schleier will ich ihr schenken, dass sich die Braut
verschleiere und sich der Nana heilige und sei eine Geweihte. Langst habe ich,
sprach er, ‘die Augendecke gekauft von einem Wandernden und sie in der Truhe
verwahrt, denn sie ist kostbar. Einer Konigstochter soli sie gehort haben vor Zeiten
und soil gewesen sein das Jungfrauengewand eines Fiirstenkindes, was da ist glaubhaft
zu sagen, so kunstfertig wie das Gewirk bestiekt ist iiber und iiber mit allerlei Zeichen
der Gbtzen. Sie aber soli ihr Haupt darein hiillen und soil sein wie der Enitu eine
und wie eine Himmelsbraut im Bettgemach des Turmes Etenemanki.’ So oder
ahnlich der Teufel zu mir. Und er log nicht mit diesen Worten, denn Rahel erhielt
das Gewand, und war eine Pracht sondergleichen damit, da wir zur Hochzeit sassen,
und ich kiisste das Bild der Ischtar. Da ich aber der Braut die Bliite gereicht, hob ich
ihr den Schleier, dass ich sie sahe mit sehenden Handen. Lea war’s, die der Teufel
listig hatte eingelassen ins Bettgemach, so dass ich nur meiner Meinung nach gliicklich

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

war, nicht aber in Wahrheit, — wer sollte nicht irre werden im Haupte, wenn er
dahinein sich verliert, darum iibergeh’ ich's. Aber besonnen war ich im vermeint-
lichen Gliick und legte gefaltet das heilige Gewirk auf den Stuhl, der da stand,
und sprach zur Braut die Worte: ‘Wir woUen ihn vererben durch die Geschlechter,
und sollen ihn tragen die Lieblinge unter den Zahllosen’.”

“Trug auch Mami das Tuch zu ihrer Stunde?”

“Es ist kein Tuch, es ist eine Pracht. Es ist ein Stiick zu freiem Gebrauch,
knochellang, mit Armeln, dass der Mensch nach seinem Geschmack und nach seiner
Schbnheit damit verfahre. Mami? Sie trug’s und behielt’s. Ein^und aufgepackt
hat sie*s treulich, als wir dahin fuhren und brachen die staubigen Riegel und prellten
Laban den Teufel. Immer hat’s uns begleitet, und wei Laban es sorglich verwahrte
von langer Hand in seiner Truhe, so auch wir.”

Josephs Augen gingen im Zelte umher und nach den Kasten. Er fragte:

“1st es uns nahe?”

“Nicht allzu fern.”

“Und mein Herr will's mir schenken?”

“Zugedacht hab’ ich's dem Kinde.”

“Zugcsagt und verheissen I ”

“Aber fiir spaterl Nicht fiir den Augenblick gleich!” rief in Unruhe Jaakob.
“Nimm Vernunft an. Kind und lass dir vorerst geniigen an der Verheissungl Siehe,
die Dinge sind in der Schwebe, und es hat der Herr sich ihretwegen noch
nicht entschieden in meinem Herzen. Dein Bruder Re’uben kam zu Falle, und ich
war genbtigt, ihn der Erstgeburt zu entkleiden. Bist nun du an der Reihe, dass ich
dich damit bekleide und gebe dir hin die Ketonet? Man konnte antworten: Nein,
denn nach Re’uben erschien Juda und erschienen Lewi und Schimeon. Man konnte
antworten; Ja, denn da Leas Erstling fiel und verflucht ward, folgt Rahels Erstling.
Das ist strittig und ungeklart; wir miissen warten und nach den Zeichen sehen, wie
es sich klare. Kleide ich dich aber ein, so miichten die Bruder es falschlich deuten, im
Sinne des Segens und der Erwahlung, und sich im Eifer erheben wider dich und
mich.”

“Wider dich?” fragte Joseph im starksten Erstaunen . . . “Ich glaube fast, ich
traue den eigenen Ohren nicht mehr! Bist du nicht der Herr? Kannst du nicht
aufstehen, falls sie murren, und deine Worte hochfahren lassen und zu ihnen sprechen;
*Ich gonne, wem ich gonne, und erbarme, wes ich erbarme! Wer seid ihr, dass ihr
mir dazwischenredet? Eher denn euch alle will ich ihn mit dem Mantel bekleiden
und mit seiner Mutter Ketonet passim I ’ Obrigens traue ich meinen Ohren; sie
sind jung und genau. Namentlich wenn das Vaterchen spricht, spitze ich sie zu
feinster Scharfe. Sagtest du einst zur Braut: ‘Es sollen den Schleier tragen die
Erstlinge unter den Zahllosen’? Sondern he? Sondern he? Sondern he? Wer,
sagtest du, soUe ihn tragen?”

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

“Lass das, Unhold! Geh und schmeichle mir nicht, dass nicht deine Narrheit
iibergehe von dir au£ mich I *’

“Vaterchen, ich mochte ihn sehen I ’*

“Sehen? Sehen ist nicht haben. Aber sehen ist haben wollen. Sei mir
verstandig!”

“Soli ich nicht sehen, was mein ist und mir verheissen? Also machen wir’s:
Ich kauere hier, gefesselt, riihre mich nicht von der Stelle. Du aber gehst und weist
mir das Festkleid, nimmst es und haltst es vor dich, wie im Gewolbe der Kaufmann
zu Hebron dem Kaufer die Ware zeigt und lasst an sich hinabhangen das Gewebe
vor den Augen des Liisternen. Der aber ist arm und kann's nicht kaufen. Da
verbirgt der Kaufmann es wieder.”

“Sei es im Namen des Herrn,” sagte Jaakob. “Wiewohl es fur Dritte wohl
aussahe, als sprangest du mit mir um. Bleib, wo du bist! Sitze auf deinen Bein,
die Hande im Rucken! Du sollst sehen, was vielleicht einmal dein sein soli, unter
IJmstanden I ”

“Was schon mein ist!" ricf Joseph ihm nach. “Und was ich nur noch nicht
habe!”

Er rieb mit den Knbcheln die Augen, machte sich zum Schauen bereit. Jaakob
ging zur gewblbten Truhe, Ibste die Riegel und schlug den Deckel zuriick.
Mancherlei Warmendes nahm er heraus, das obenauf und tiefer lag. Mantel und
Decken, Schurze, Kopftiicher, Hemden, und Hess es gefaltet zu Boden fallen auf einen
Haufen. Er fand den Schleier, wo er ihn wusste, nahm ihn, wandte sich, Hess ihn
aus den Falten fallen und spreizte ihn auseinander.

Der Knabe staunte. Er zog die Luft ein durch seinen offenen, lachenden Mund.
Die Metallstickereien glitzerten im Lampenlicht. Silber^ und Goldblitze uberblen-
deten zwischen den unruhigen Armen des Alten zuweilen den stilleren Farbenschein,
den Purpur, das Weiss, Olivengriin, Rosa und Schwarz der Zeichen und Bilder, der
Sterne, Tauben, Baume, Gotter, Engel, Menschen und Tiere im blauHchen Nebel des
Griindgewebes.

“Ihr himmlischen Lichter!" stiess Joseph hervor. “Wie schon ist das!
Vaterchen Kaufmann, was zeigst du dem Kunden da in deinem Gewolbe? Das ist
Gilgamesch mit dem Lowen im Arm, ich erkenn* ihn von Weitem! Und doit
kampft, wie ich sehe, Einer mit einem Greifen und schwingt die Keule. Warte,
warte! Ihr Zebaoth, was fiir Getier I Das sind die Buhlen der Gbttin, Ross, Fleder-
maus, Wolf und der Bunte Vogel! Lass mich doch sehen — doch sehen! Ich
kenn’s nicht, ich unterscheid’s nicht. Die armen Augen brennen dem Kinde vom
Schauen iiber den trennenden Raum. Ist das das Skorpion'Menschenpaar mit den
Stachelschwanzen? Gewiss bin ich nicht, doch scheint es mir so, wenn auch
begreiflicherweise die Augen mir etwas tranen. Warte, Kaufmann, ich rutsche naher
auf meinem Bein, die Hande im Rucken. O ihr Elohim, nahebei verschbnt es sich
noch, und alles wird deutlich! Was tun die bartigen Geister am Baum? Sie

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

befruchten ihn, . . Und was steht gcschrieben? 'Ausgezogen — hab ich — mein
Kleid, soil ich’s — wieder anziehen?’ Wunderbarl Immer die Nana mit Taube,
Sonne und Mond. . . Ich muss mich erheben! Ich muss aufstehen, Kaufmann, ich
sehe das Obere nicht: die Dattelpalme, aus der eine Gottin die Arme streckt mit
Speise und Trank. . . Ich darfs doch beriihren? Das kostet nichts, hofEe ich, wenn
ich’s schonend aufhebe mit der Hand, zu spuren, wie leicht und schwer es ist, wenn
man’s wiegt, wie schwer und wie leicht im Gemische. . . Kaufmann, ich bin arm,
ich kann es nicht kaufen. Kaufmann, schcnk’ es mir! Du hast so viel Ware, — lass
mir den Schleier! Leih ihn mir, sei so gut, dass ich ihn an mir den Leuten zeige zu
Ehren deines Gewolbesl Nein? Durchaus nicht? Oder schwankst du vielleicht?
Schwankst du ein ganz klein wenig und mochtest in aller Strenge auch weider, dass
ich ihn trage? Nein, ich irrc mich, du schwankst vom Halten und Spreizen, Viel
zu lange schon miihst du dich. . . Gib! Wie tragt man’s, wie schlagt man’s? So?
Und so? Und etwa noch so? Wie gefallt dir’s? Bin ich ein Schafervogel im
bunten Rock? Mamis Schleiergewand—^wie steht es dem Sohne?”

Natiirlich sah er aus wie ein Gott. Der EfEekt war vernuriftigerweise zu
erwarten und der geheime Wunsch, ihn hervorzubringen, dem Widerstand Jaakobs
nicht zutraglich gewesen. Kaum hatte Joseph mit Methoden, deren Schlauheit und
Anmut man am besten tut ruhig anzuerkennen, das Kleid aus den Handen des Alten
in seine hinuberspielt, als es auch schon, mit drei, vier Griffen und Wiirfen, deren
Sicherheit eine naturliche Anlage zur Selbstkostumierung bewies, auf freie und
giinstige Art seiner Person angetan gewesen war, — ihm das Haupt bedeckte, die
Schultern umwand, an seiner jungen Gestalt in Fallen herabwallte, aus denen die
Silbertauben blitzten, die Buntstickereien gliihten, und deren langer Fall ihn grosser
als sonst erscheinen liess. Grosser? Hatte es dabei nur sein Bewenden gehabt!
Aber der Prunkschleier stand ihm auf eine Weise zu Gesicht, dass es schwer gefalien
ware, seinem Ruf unter den Leuten noch irgendwelchen massigenden Widerpart zu
bieten, er machte ihn dermassen hubsch und schon, dass es schon nicht mehr geheuer
war und tatsachlich ans Gdttliche grenzte. Das Schlimmste war, dass seine Ahnlich-
keit mit der Mutter, in Stirn, Braue, Mundbildung, Blick nie so sehr in die Augen
gesprungen war, als dank dieser Gewandung,— dem Jaakob in die Augen, so dass
sie ihm ubergingen und er nicht anders meinte, als sahe er Rahel in Labans Saal am
Tag der Erfiillung.

Lachelnd stand im Knaben die Muttergottin vor ihm und fragte:

“Ich habe mein Kleid angezogen, — soil ich’s wieder ausziehen?’’

“Nein, behalt’ es, behalt’ es!’’ sagte der Vater ; und wahrend der Gott entsprang,
hob jener Stirn und Hande, und seine Lippen bewegten sich im Gebet.

BERLIN

THOMAS MANN

EARLY MANHOOD

I shall be greatly obliged if you will add to your many tributes to Rabindranath
Tagore these words from myself, wishing him a most happy birthday and
future and many fruitful years of poetry bringing new delight and new under¬
standing into the world.

OXFORD JOHN MASEFIELD

TO RABINDRANATH TAGORE
{Whom of all poets I love best, for none has spoken of God as he did)

Through all our earthly ways there gleams a thread—

We follow it by inward inspiration,—

That leads from gloom and from inertia dead
To the free space and light of Initiation.

Thus Theseus from Cretan monster fled

Through Ariadne’s thread brought to salvation.

Thus we, from birth to birth still higher led.

We wander through the cycles of creation.

Till we attain the perfect state divine.

The consciousness that God in us does shine
And that we move in Him like constellations,

Yet keeping each our colours and vibrations.

Till we unite in those high spheres above
A white, a radiant nebula of love.

TOKYO INA METAXA

157

RABINDRANATH’S PLACE IN INDIAN LITERATURE

W HEN Rabindranath got the Nobel Prize, India suddenly and with a pleasant
surprise became conscious after a long and disturbing night that she, who
had witnessed so many vicissitudes—political and cultural, since the dawn
of the Vedic singers, had still something to say, something to contribute to the New
Culture which was being fashioned with such energy and eclat by the younger
nations—specially of Europe and America. It merely marked the end of an epoch
of a long period of gestation rather than indicate any sudden outburst of creative
energy on the part of a submerged people whose spiritual growth had become
arrested in course of time. Civilisations also seem to move in cycles—up and
down like the hub of a wheel, or as Kalidasa expresses it, nicair gacchaty upari
ca dasa. cakra'nemukramena. People could hardly understand the significance
of Vivekananda’s journey to the West. The daring of a solitary and resourceless
monk to preach India’s age-old message of spiritual harmony and brotherhood of
man to the powerful nations of England and America verged on the borders of
recklessness ; but Vivekananda was only the harbinger of the dawn that was breaking
on the Himalayan peaks and after the inevitable darkness of fatigue and exhaus¬
tion was already flooding the valleys of Hindustan with its light of song and
devotion. Rabindranath mirrored and epitomised the soul of India as no other
poet had done since Kalidasa. The only figure comparable to him in recent times
was the great Goethe who symbolised the Germany that was to be. The most
striking thing about both Goethe and Rabindranath is of course their versatility
and their singular mastery over the music of words. And yet, these are by no
means the most important features of their intellectual constitution. India had so
perfected the art of musical and literary expression through centuries of intensive
cultivation, that verbal mastery of the highest quality had ceased to be something
novel and uncommon. Sanskrit, the mother of languages, had been transformed
from the direct and simple tongue of the early singers of the Vedic hymns into an
elegant and singularly supple and musical language of the aristocracy. Its medieval
offsprings—the vernaculars—the languages that are spoken to-day, did not take
long to imbibe the accustomed cadence and music of the mother-tongue, and at
least one of them, the language of the Braj —the language in which the blind poet
Suradas sang his passionate rhapsodies to the divine Radha and Krishna and which
is spoken round about Mathura, had not only rivalled, but surpassed the Sanskrit
in sheer artistry of form and verbal rhythm. Bengali had almost unconsciously
glided from the elegant and alliterative melodies of Jayadeva’s Sanskrit GitU'Govinda,
into the beautiful and enchanting songs of Chandidasa and Vidyapati of the 15 th
century. Facile expression had therefore long ceased to be a virtue or an uncommon
accomplishment.

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

With us poetry and song have been inseparable even as in the case of the early
folk'songs of Europe, and the medium of song or lyrical poetry has been perfected
to an extent that cannot be imagined outside India. It was in fact the principal
channel through which literary and spiritual culture filtered down, without literacy,
from the fountain source to the lowliest, throughout the length and breadth of the
country. Thus are Tulasidas and Kabir known and sung wherever a little Hindi
is understood. The literary culture of Hindustan is perhaps unique in the world
and is not to be inferred and measured by the stupendous illiteracy of the people ;
for long before the invention of writing were the songs of the sacred Vedas trans¬
mitted and kept intact through the medium of an oral tradition for centuries on
end and nowhere else in the world is it possible to see such intimate contact of
understanding between the poet and the people as in India. Popular culture in an
old country such as ours is something quite apart from popular literacy and there
is in fact no doubt that modern education has, instead of widening the sphere of
that culture, generally contracted it and certainly not always improved its quality.

Rabindranath’s singular felicity of expression, which strikes the foreign reader
so forcibly, is merely a common feature of the intensive development of linguistic
art in this country. His mysticism and humanity—the elusive and universal
character of his poetry, are parts of his cultural inheritance. Where however he is
different from and surpasses his predecessors is the range of his interests, the variety
of the media which he has used for the expression of his genius, and the dramatic
quality of his major contributions. This latter characteristic is specially prominent
in his short stories and dramatic pieces, where poetry becomes vibrant with conflict¬
ing emotions and pours forth in a torrent of impassioned eloquence. All the graces
of Tagore’s poetic art blend in a singularly effective amalgam to bring out and lay
bare the varying and often contradictory elements of the human heart. I know of
no more poignant and effective example of the dramatist’s art than the short dialogue
between Kama and Kunti.

Rabindranath like Tolstoy is always in sympathy with his dramatis personae
and hence every character unfolds itself with the same naturalness and grace even
as a flower. His essentially devout nature, his flaming sense of right, his passionate
feeling for the poor and the exploited, his deep love for his country and righteous
indignation for the wrongs done to and suffered by her, never obtrude themselves
in his great dramas—such as Chitra, Karna and Kunti, his hitherto untranslated
Natir Puja. Barring Bhasa—the master dramatist whom even Kalidasa paid his
homage, there is hardly any other figure in the entire range of Indian literature
who has had the dramatic quality of Tagore. But then, Rabindranath is also a
consummate actor, a superb musician and an artist of rare susceptibility for graphic
rhythm and plastic form. The world has rarely seen such an extraordinary and
lavish combination of gifts and Rabindranath has used them freely and unstintingly.
A characteristic feature of all his literary contributions is the creation of an appro-

159

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

priate atmosphere as a stage or a conductor for his poetic outpourings and this is
achieved with the unerring instinct and swift precision of a great painter. It is
only recently that Tagore himself came to realize his capacity for graphic form and
with his amazing essays in this field of sheer form and rhythm, one is naturally
tempted to apply the language of linear art as an instrument of appraising, for
picking out the essential qualities of his literary contributions. Personally—^and
it may be the experience of most Indians, I have always felt that it is in the plays
and short stories rather than in his elaborate poetic compositions that Tagore’s
varied genius has manifested itself in all its wealth of imagery, pointed imagina^
tion, acute understanding of the human nature, its essential sympathy with its
weaknesses and its eternal urge for the ideal. And here, one hardly realizes
whether it is the milieu as such or the doings of the human actors which matter
most; so surely and inseparably are the atmosphere, the colour and the characters
blended by the Master in a single harmony. And yet, this has always been the
quality, the supreme achievement of our classical poets like Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti.
The Indian mind approaches Nature spontaneously and as it were, by instinct, in
its universal aspect, almost as a child reaches out to its mother; and this feeling
dominates every phase of all truly Indian art, whether it be literary, graphic or
plastic.

As a poet Rabindranath’s place is naturally with our great Vaishnavite singers,
to whom he is never tired of acknowledging his indebtedness. But then, the
essential quality of Vaishnavism—the complete surrender of self, in fact the total
loss, or shall 1 call it, absorption of the individual self into, the universal and supreme
Reality, is not peculiar to India, but is the unmistakable hall-mark of humanity
wherever it has felt the immanence of God and the utter insignificance of our petty
human achievements. If Tagore, as a playwright, is a compeer and in the direct
line of descent of the classical writers, such as Bhasa, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti, as
a singer, he is of the family of the medieval Bhaktas —whose rhapsodies were but
the humble, inadequate expression of their inner feeling, sometimes in terms of
affection, sometimes in terms of reproach, but always in a mood of passionate surge
to reach and hold fast to the ever-elusive, all pervading Reality. Devotion—and
not poetry, the inner identity and not the external form were what mattered. But
then, what great poetry is possible without the uttermost sincerity, without the inner
harmony of the spirit? Without these poetry becomes merely an essay in verbal
jugglery, a matter of skilled manipulation rather than a searching into the depths
of the human soul, an attempt to soar high and free.

Twenty years ago who could have dreamt that Mother India—poor, not merely
in material goods but veritably poor in spirit, distracted and diffident, had any
future but slow and certain death, for she had ceased to be creative for the past two
hundred years and more, and it appeared that the magnificent mausoleum of the
Taj was not merely the memorial of undying love, but unwittingly the last monu-

i6o

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

merit to the achievements of an old country which had a past, but no future?
The hope and confidence that are the keynote of the present were not even felt;
so dismal was the outlook. Rabindranath and Mohandas Gandhi—each an artist
in his own sphere and indubitably among the world’s immortals, could hardly be
conceived as a possibility. It did not then seem at all possible that the downward
cycle had almost finished its course and that India was once again on the upward
march, that she—the mother of so many cultures, the witness of so many conquests
of Dharma—of Righteousness in every part of the world, was once again alive and
awakened, and that she too had a part to play in the future, commensurate with her
past. Gandhi and Tagore are thus the sons of the radiant, the ever youthful
Mother, whose future none can now foretell. Is there any doubt that c'est le
printemps qui sonne?

NAINITAL, INDIA NANALAL C. MEHTA

O N behalf of the Anglo'Indians, a community having a common birthright in the
land of India, I offer our sincerest and highest congratulations on the coming
birth^anniversary of the Poet. Being sons of the soil, the Anglo-Indians
rejoice to think that a true son of the soil has raised the name of India to deserve the
honour of the nations around, by contributing to the world’s peace, in bringing near
to us the Divine, Who, as has been said, “hath made of one blood all nations of men
to dwell on the face of the earth.’’

CALCUTTA H. W. B. MORENO

i6i

GOETHE AND INDIA

T he Indian and the German peoples are children of the same mother. But they
were separated in their childhood and sent to very distant countries, and
thousands of years have elapsed in which they have had no sort of inters
course and no knowledge of each other. During the whole of the middle ages nought
but some fabulous accounts of India reached Germany. After the sea^route to India
had been discovered, some Europeans went to India and returned home with a fuller
and truer knowledge of its inhabitants, their beliefs and rites, their customs and social
order. Most of them were missionaries whose interest was chiefly in religion. They
went to southern India, and if they learned anything of Indian languages, it was
Tamil, not Sanskrit. The first of them was a Dutchman, Abraham Roger, who lived
at Pulicat and Batavia and died in 1649. After his death his work The Open Door
to Hidden Heathendom was published; it was translated into German in 1663. It
contained the first specimen of Indian literature; two hundred stanzas of Bhartrihari
(the Vairagya and the Niti Satakas, that about love being excluded), but it met with
no serious interest. The next to follow Roger were chiefly Portuguese and French¬
men—we even meet with a German among them. But it was not before the close
of the 18th century, after the establishment of the British dominion, that the classical
language of India became accessible to European scholars, and now Englishmen had
the lead. At this time there appeared in rapid succession a series of classical works
of Indian literature, and we must own that the Brahman helpers who advised the
Europeans and led them to an understanding of the poems made an excellent choice.
So we came to know the Bhagavad-gita Hitopadesa 17^7* GitU'govinda,

BhagavatU'purana 1788, Sakuntala 1789, Manava Dharma^sastra 1796 5 at the same
time the first edition of a Sanskrit original was printed in Europe: RitU'Samhara

1792*

In Germany it was Sakuntala which decided the victory of Indian poetry, and
the man who was the first to feel its beauty and the first herald of its fame was the
great inspirer of our classical period, the listener to the voices of various nations:
Herder. He had already given a somewhat dim ideal picture of the Indian people
in his chief work Ideas on a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Third Part,
1787). Now George Forster, the circumnavigator of the world and revolutionary,
sent him his translation of the English Sakuntala on the 2nd May, 1791. Herder
received the gift with enthusiasm, and in the following year he gave his impression
in the fourth collection of his Scattered Leaves {Zerstreute Blatter). These three
Letters On an Oriental Drama were for a long time the best appreciation the poem
met with in Germany. Before him, immediately on reading it, Goethe had expressed
his admiration in the few lines which praise Sakuntala as the sum-total of poetic

162

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

perfection. He retained this love for it all his life and gave expression to it more
than once. As late as in 1930, when the French scholar de Chezy sent him the
first edition of the original with a French translation, he thanked him in an
enthusiastic letter which sounds like an enlarged paraphrase of that epigram:

When I first became acquainted with this unfathomable work, it aroused such
enthusiasm in me, it attracted me so that I could not forbear studying it ; I even felt
impelled to the impossible task of acquiring it for the German stage. Through these
endeavours, fruitless though they were, I became so intimately familiar with this most
precious work, it has marked, such an epoch in my life, it has become so entirely my own
that 1 have not once looked either at the English or at the German text these thirty years.
. . . . . It is only now that I realise the overwhelming impression that work has made
on me at an earlier age. Here the poet appears in his highest function, as the representa¬
tive of the most natural state, of the most refined form of life, of the purest moral striving,
of the worthiest majesty and the most solemn contemplation of God ; at the same time he
is lord and master of his creation to so great an extent that he may venture vulgar and
ludicrous contrasts which yet must be regarded as necessary links of the whole organisa¬
tion . I will break off and only repeat the statement: that your Sakuntala must

be reckoned among the most beautiful of the stars which make my nights more splendid
than my day.

This love was even shared by Schiller who otherwise took little interest in Indian
literature. He admired especially the picture of the heroine as a model of tender
womanliness deeming it far superior to the best female figures of Greek tragedy.
And he too tried to adjust it for the use of the German stage, but he found it unsuited
through its extreme delicacy and its want of dramatic movement.

In their love for Sakuntala Herder and Goethe were in perfect agreement. In
other respects there was a great difference in their attitude towards India. Herder
was gradually becoming old and moralising. The moral purity and tenderness of
Sakuntala had captivated him. And so it was the rich treasure of Indian gnomic
and didactic poetry that appealed to him most. In the same volume of his Scattered
Leaves which contained his letters on Sakuntala and which was almost entirely
dedicated to the Orient, he offered his Thoughts of some Brahmans, a selection of
gnomic stanzas in free translation gathered from Bhagavad'gita, Hitopadesa and
Bhartrihari. That was his contribution to the adoption of Indian literature by
Germany ; it has not been fruitless, as many of these excellent verses have found their
way into reading books for schools.

Goethe, on the other hand, felt as a poet and an artist. He was delighted by
the harmonious beauty and lyrical intensity of the masterpieces of epics and kavya,
but he did not care for Hitopadesa and philosophy, and he declined an interest in
Indian mythology and sculpture. Up to the epoch-making year 1791 he had not
been completely ignorant about India. In his youth he had read some of the
travellers’ accounts which were then current, such as Dapper and Sonnerat, had
gathered from them the story of Rama and other epic tales, and being very fond of

163

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

telling fairy-tales from his earliest childhood, when even on his mother’s lap he
vied with her in fabulous invention, he annexed them to this store, and the master-
monkey Hannemann (as he found the name spelt, looking rather German) in
particular delighted his youthful public. But the first deep impression was made
by Sakuntala. And this bore fruit in his poetry. His Faust begins with a Prelude
on the Theatre in which the director, the poet and the humorist discuss their
different views on dramatic poetry. It was written in the year 1797, and it was
long being noticed that the idea was suggested by the Prologue of Sakuntala. As
it seems, the first to see the connection was Heinrich Heine, the poet who in a few
lines has shaped that picture of India which lives in each German soul where a
detailed knowledge of India is lacking:

Am Ganges duftet’s und leuchtet’s,

Und Riesenba”ume blu”hn,

Und scho^ne, stille Menschen
Vor Lotosblumen knien.

The same year 1797 saw the birth of Goethe’s first Indian ballad The God and
the Bayadere. Goethe gave the story as he found it in his source, the account of
an old traveller (Sonnerat?), and I do not know its origin. Vishnu in one of his avatars
meets a bayadere {deva^dasi, nautch-girl), enters her house and is well received. In
the morning she finds him dead at her side, and she is so filled with his love that she
feels herself his wife and throws herself on the funeral pile to die after him. Then
the God arises from the flame and takes her with him into his heaven. Goethe un-
voluntarily gives the story a slight Christian note (“God rejoices over penitent
sinners’’), but his principal aim is to demonstrate the deep human meaning of the
Indian tale: the apotheosis of faithfulness unto death in a woman from whom it is
neither demanded nor expected.

But however strong and fruitful this love for India was, it was at first but an
episode. On the whole, India could not have a similar importance for Goethe as
Greece had, just because of the relationship of the Indian and the German minds.
Both have a tendency towards formlessness and boundlessness, towards inwardness
and transcendentalism. It is from a feeling of this want that the German mind
seeks compensation in the study and discipleship of those nations which are especially
gifted in the direction of clarity and finish of form—in the first place the ancient
Greeks, and to some degree the Romanic nations, especially the French. In this school
Goethe and Schiller had attained their definite style, so that their classical poetry may
be regarded as the latest and highest phase of renaissance poetry. It is evident that
this striving after perfect form and measure must make them ill-disposed towards
Indian literature, in which they perceived the very want of discipline which they
themselves were striving to overcome. And so, when after the deliverance of
Germany Goethe took refuge in the East from the repugnant world which surrounded
him, steeped himself in Eastern poetry and gave expression to his personal feelings in

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Oriental costume, India had no part in this “West'Eastern Divan." Yet at the very
tune he was working at it, he found his way back to his previous love, and the poem
that led him back was the finest piece of kavya, the MeghU'duta (again Kalidasa!),
translated into English by Horace Wilson, which he received in March, 1817 and
welcomed as "a great treasure.” We find allusions to it in a poem of 1821, and then,
in due course, follows Goethe’s second and sublimest Indian ballad The Pariah.
(1824. Just before The Pariah had been introduced to the French and the German
stages). The poem illustrates the truth that before God no human distinction of rank
and worth can stand, that all states, all classes of society are alike near his heart and
have the same claim on his mercy. The principal poem is encompassed by two
prayers which refer to the former ballad. The bayaderes having got their divine
representative, the pariah claims the same favour for himself, and it is granted him
by the miraculous event that forms the subject of the “legend.” This Goethe has
taken from the same traveller, but here we can trace it back to the Mahabharata.

At this time the interest in India was widespread and consolidated in Germany.
The very reason which to some extent made Goethe stand aloof gave the romantic
poets a predilection for India, but they did not content themselves with glorifying it
in poetry, they laid the foundation of a real science of India. The brothers Schlegel,
the fathers of romanticism, were also the fathers of German Indology; and here, as
elsewhere, Friedrich opened up the way by dint of intuition (in his book On the
Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 1808), while August Wilhelm developed an
Indian philology on the model of classical philology and became the first professor at
the newly founded university of Bonn 1818. Bopp followed suit in Berlin ; both pro^
duced a series of excellent editions, most of them with a Latin translation. Goethe
followed them in their work with benevolent interest and appropriated what was
congenial to him. So he was deeply impressed by the Gita^govinda, though he came to
know it only from a very defective secondhand translation. Moreover, some fragments
of the Mahabharata (the story of Nala) and the Ramayana gained his approbation.
And so, what he appreciated and enjoyed, were specimens of epical and classical litera.-
ture, chiefly love-poetry. (Vedic literature was at that time still an inaccessible world).

It is little more than a century since the Germans began to take their share in
exploring India. But if they came last, they were certainly not the least, and I venture
to say that no other people has done more for the investigation and appreciation of
Indian language and literature, religion and philosophy. But as a spiritual com'
m union must constitute a reciprocity of giving and taking, the other half of the work
remains still to be done: India’s discovery of Germany and her acceptance of her
spiritual treasure. That will be the task of the next century.

When the Indian genius first found its way into Germany, it was through the
medium of foreign travellers and English officers ; India herself had no active part in
this process. Now she comes to us embodied in a living man, the bearer of her
message. With him a new stage in this intercourse has begun. And not only the

165

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

form, but the contents have changed. Rabindranath Tagore is not the messenger
of India alone, but the announcer and prophet of a new humanity in which the best
and deepest aspirations of the Eastern and the Western man are united. This he
presents to our eyes in his teaching, in his work, in his person. Herder and Goethe
laid the foundation of a universal literature in the German language (the term is
Goethe’s), in which the voices of all nations were to mingle.. Rabindranath Tagore
initiates a universal culture in which all nations will co-operate, each bringing its
own gift in brotherly union. In this sense we all feel ourselves to be his disciples and
bow to him in deep veneration.

HAMBURG HEINRICH MEYER-BENFEY

S OME would wonder why I am an optimist. Pessimism is right if one considers
only the destiny of an individual. Optimism is inevitable if one is able to feel
the eternal truth of the human will. An enormous tree, even if told that it will
be dried up and dead some few hundred years hence, cannot but sing its own joyous
song, praising life and growing upwards towards the heavens.

TOKYO I. MUSHAKOJI

S UR notre pauvre terre, toujours gluante des memes iniquites et des memes
basesses, Tagore m’apparait comme une de ces lumineuses figures, un de ces
douloureux missionnaires de fraternite qui dominent les tenebres et les haines,
forcent le degout et la honte chcz les hommcs qui s’egorgent.

PARIS MARC ELMER

i66

A BENEDICTION

The German poet says—

Wer den Dichter will verstehen
Muss in Dichte/s Lande gehen:

‘One who wishes to understand a poet must go to the poet’s land.’

I had the pleasure, not only of seeing, and meeting, and hearing, and reading,
and talking with, the poet in whose honour I write these few words, but also had the
pleasure of going to and sleeping for one night at his Santiniketan, which is his land
of lands. I remember with pleasure now—though at the time when the event
happened it gave me much pain—that one night I had to shed my own blood for
him not strictly for him, but after him. A few years ago, the Ripon Club of the
Parsees of Bombay gave in his honour, when he was in Bombay, a dinner, presided
over by Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, the fifth Baronet. At the close of the dinner, when
he departed, I followed him and the Honorary Secretary of the Club, and the swing
door shut up after them rushed back in a manner which cut my hand. Instead of
going home, I went to a chemist and druggist’s shop in the neighbourhood to get my
hand dressed. It is a custom on this side of India, especially in Kathiawar, that on
great occasions relating to the ruling Princes,—occasions like those of accession to the
throne, or marriage—the Prime Minister, or an honoured member of a noble family,
puts a cut on the thumb of his hand and marks with the oozing blood, the forehead of
his royal master, as a symbol of sacrifice on his part, which symbol is now taken as
that of a good omen. I had no occasion or opportunity to apply the blood oozing
from my hand to the forehead of the poet, who, in his own way, in his line, is a prince
or a prince of princes. But I vividly remember that occasion now with pleasure, and
take the dropping of the blood as my poor and humble sacrifice to his intellectual
forehead, the poems flowing from which brighten and illuminate, smooth and sweeten
the thoughts of many a son and daughter of India. Again, I had once the pleasure
of delivering a lecture on a poem of the poet at the Bai Bhikhaiji Bengali School in
Bombay.

The first time I saw the poet, I was immediately impressed with his look. Every
inch, he looked like one of the Rishis of the olden times, who were both poets and
prophets or seers. The Persian word for a poet is Sha'ir which, coming from an
Arabic root, means ‘a finder, a seer’. So great Poets of the East were both ShaHrs and
Seers, Poets and Prophets. The Persian word for a Prophet is Paighani'bar, literally
a bearer of message (from God).’ Dr. Rabindranath Tagore has given us a number of
messages, ^messages which have soothed and solaced many a heart of his countrymen.
Now, some of his readers in the different parts of the world are expected to send
messages in honour of this Messenger of Messengers. The humble message of this

167

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

poor pen, whose holder has seen him, heard him, read him, talked with him, dined
with him, and even offered a blood sacrifice in his honour, is simply this:

‘O Ahura Mazda! Give him a healthy life, a long life, so that he may long
continue to send his messages to his countrymen, in whose poetic eyes the whole
world is one country.’

And may I be allowed to pray in the words of my own Prophet:

Afnndmi tava, nara, voku-jiti, us-jiti, dareghem-jiti.

‘O Brave Man! I pray that you may live a good life, that you may live an
exalted life, that you may live a long life.*

I pray in the words of our Pazend Tan-durusti (Prayer of Blessings):

Tan-durusti, der zivashni,

Khoreh anghat ashahiddr,

Yazddn-i minoydn, Yazddn-i getiydn, haft Ameshdspanddn ha/tn&h befasdd

‘May you have Health of Body, may you have a Long Life.

May you have Righteous Splendour.

May the Yazatas of the unseen world, the Yazatas of this physical world,
and the seven Divine Powers always come to your help.’

BOMBAY JIVANJI JAMSHEDJI MODI

M y elder brother, who can reach into the lofty heights of the Eternal, often
stoops down to dry a tear; He is himself like the transparent glittering
drop suspended on the eyelash of a child, still full of sorrow, but already
dimly smiling.

SOERAKARTA, JAVA

MANGKOENEGORO VII

^a.-

^ *gS(

THE POET DURING THE SWADESHI MOVEMENT (1906)

TAGORE IN CHICAGO

< tr^OETRY: A Magazine of Verse” had the honour of being the first occidental
1 publication to print Tagore’s poems in English. His six Gitanjali poems,
appearing in Poetry for December 1912, preceded by a few weeks the
London India Society’s private edition, which, though dated 1912, was not
distributed until 1913.

Poetry, published in Chicago, was far away from India and even from London,
where the Bengali poet had been sojourning; and its founder and editor had never
heard of Tagore. But Ezra Pound, our foreign correspondent, had met him in
London, and had induced him to permit the sending of some of the Gitanjali poems
to the new little poets’ magazine.

I remember how excited we were when they arrived. Devotional poetry is
rarely of value considered as poetry, but these were beautiful devotional poems, and
the religious feeling they expressed was a tribute to the universal God of all races
and creeds.

A few days after the December number appeared. The Chicago Tribune, taking
Tagore’s poems for its text, devoted an editorial to Poetry's international aspirations,
and soon we were amazed to receive a letter signed by a younger Tagore in the
University of Illinois, saying: ‘My father is visiting me here, and would like a
few copies of the magazine containing his poems.’

This was news indeed—the distinguished oriental poet, whom I had supposed
to be at home in India, if not still in London, was for a time our neighbour in rny
own state! I wrote to him at once, inviting him to Chicago; and Mrs. William
Vaughan Moody, widow of the poet, seconded the invitation with an offer of her
generous hospitality.

Soon after New Year’s Day Mr. Tagore arrived with his son and exquisite
little daughter-in-law, and during that winter the visit was repeated three or four
times. This was a year before his, Nobel Prize award and all its attendant publicity.
So we were able to get acquainted with the poet without interference from the
world’s curiosity. We used to spend evenings around Mrs. Moody’s fire listening
to the chanting of poems in Bengali, or the recitation of their English equivalents,
and feeling as if we were seated at the feet of some ancient wise man of the East,
generous in his revelation of beauty. He talked also about his native country and
the meaning of that huge word ‘India,’ and about his hope for more friendly con¬
sideration from the governing pov/ers of the world.

Thus I came to think of Rabindranath Tagore as a friend; and although years
have passed since I last saw him, I still feel something warm and intimate in his
rich personality which makes and holds friends in every country he has visited. On
this, his seventieth birthday, I would salute him first as a friend, even before I pay
tribute to the distinguished poet, long dear to the hearts of his countrymen, whom
now all the world delights to honor, since his art and its message of beauty are for
all the world.

CHICAGO

169

HARRIET MONROE

TAGORE AS A POLITICAL THINKER

T AGORE’S contributions to political thought have not received adequate
attention as compared with his contributions to literature and art. His
purely political writings do not also form any very considerable part of his
total literary output. But they are enough to bring out the originality and definite¬
ness of some of his political theories and notions, especially in their application to
India. His first political writings appeared more than twenty-five years ago during
those stirring times of 1905 and 1906, when Bengal, and, to some extent the whole
of India, were thrown into a state of great political excitement, due to Lord Curzon’s
partition of Bengal, executed against the unanimous wishes of a great people. Those
were the days when the mere muttering of Bande Mataram by tender striplings was
visited with the punishment of their expulsion from Government Schools, under the
new regime of resolute government inaugurated in the newly created province of
Eastern Bengal and Assam by its first Governor, Sir Bampfylde Fuller. The reply
which Bengal gave to these iniquitous circulars of Messrs. Carlyle and Risley was the
establishment of her first National College at Calcutta under the principalship of
Sri Aurobindo Ghose with national schools affiliated to it at different centres, and
controlled by a Governing Body with Sir Rashbehary Ghose as its President, and
Sir Gooroo Dass Bannerjee as one of its most active members. There was, however,
going on behind the scenes a deep national movement which was preparing the
ground upon which these new institutions were to take root. Of this movement,
Tagore assumed his natural leadership, assisted by the organising ability and the
practical commonsense of one of Bengal’s greatest sons, Srijut Hirendra Nath Datta.

As boys were being expelled from different Government Schools for the sin of
singing the national song of Bande Mataram, national schools were springing up to
receive them. When their claim to recognition was refused by the Calcutta Univer¬
sity, the senior students of the University who were appearing at the Degree
Examinations at once organised a boycott of University Examinations by way of
protest. The present writer was then going in for the P.R.S. examination and
became one of the ringleaders of this Boycott Movement, along with Professors
Rabindra Narayan Ghosh, Nripendra Nath Banerji and several others who were all
candidates for the M.A. Examination in 1905. It was very difficult to keep up the
boycott against overwhelming difficulties. It was only the consummate leadership
of Tagore which enabled the young men to keep their eyes fixed on their goal and
ideal. Tagore used to meet them, almost every evening, in the rooms of the then
Metropolitan Institution, and gave expression to the new-born spirit of freedom
inspiring the youth of Bengal by the composition of what are called his national
songs, which rank very high in both the poetry and music of Tagore. Every evening

170

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

would he come to the meeting with songs composed for the occasion and either sing
them himself or have them sung for purposes of instruction by one of his prominent
disciples, the late Ajit Kumar Chakravarti. Very shortly he came out into the open
to deliver a series of powerful polemics and threw himself heart and soul into political
pamphleteering, just as Milton did under similar circumstances, leaving aside his lyre.
Learned papers followed in quick succession and were delivered to audiences beyond
computation at overflow meetings. The most important and classical of these
writings are entitled Swadeshi Samaj, Saphalatar Sadupaya, Avastha'O-Vyavastha,
Brahman, Atyukti, and the like.

The political philosophy expounded in these writings is not the product of the
poet’s imagination, but is severely scientific, original, and well-founded in history,
though, perhaps, Tagore might have worked with a general vision of that history
without its details and documents. Quite recently, Tagore has given to Mahatma
Gandhi the credit for giving to the world for the first time a new technique for
political revolutions by which a people in servitude might win its freedom by the
methods of bloodless warfare, of Non-Violent Civil Resistance. And yet, more than
twenty-five years ago, Tagore himself gave the first adequate exposition of the
principle of political evolution by which a self-governing society can checkmate an
aggressive State by shutting itself up within the walls of Non-co-operation. Tagore
has, for the first time, pointed out how in the distinctive political evolution of India
the State and Society have operated as separate and co-ordinating entities, each
with its defined sphere of work and jurisdiction, so that each knew of its limits
of interference. India has believed in the eighteenth century European doctrine of
laissez faire, laisseZ passer in imposing the utmost possible limits upon State-inter¬
ference so as to give to the people the largest liberty in the management of their own
vital concerns. India has not believed in any system of centralisation or over-govern¬
ment, but has always stood for the self-government of the Group formed on all possible
principles of association, functional or local. India has thus, through the ages, built
up a vast subterranean democracy, limiting the absolutism of her many political
autocracies functioning at the top. It was this inherent native democracy of India,
the democracy centred in her innumerable villages and social groups, which has helped
India to preserve her soul against the many political revolutions affecting her body-
politic in the different periods of her chequered history. In the words of Sir George
Birdwood:

India has undergone more religious and political revolutions than any other country
in the world, but the village communities remain in full municipal vigour all over the
peninsula. Scythian, Greek, Saracen, Afghan, Moghul, and Maratha have come down
from its mountains, and Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Dane up out of its seas
and set up their successive dominations in the land ; but the religious trades-union villages
have remained as little affected by their coming and going as a rock by the rising and
falling of the tide.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

It was this live democracy o£ India that is indeed responsible, not merely for
the conservation of her culture, but even for the flowering of that culture during the
darkest days of her political history under the first batch of her Moslem rulers.
Indeed, it would appear that when the tyranny of Moslem rule was at its worst, the
indigenous culture of India, far from being choked by the political powers, was assert'
ing itself best and evolving out of its prolific vitality new means of self-expression.
During these days of political confusion, India saw some of her greatest religious
leaders, like Basava, Ramanuja and Madhava in the South ; Ramanand, Kabir,
Chaitanya, Vallabhacharya and Nanak in the North ; men of letters like Bhavabhuti,
Sri'Harsha, Rajasekhara, Jayadeva, Kahlana, Sayanacharya or iVedantadesika-
char of the South; Vidyapati, Chandidasa and Mirabai, Tulasidasa and Dadu and
Tukaram; or legists like Kulluka, Jimutavahana, Vijnanesvara, Vachaspati Misra
and Raghunandana. The fact is that India has never trusted and given herself up
wholly to politics, nor is she prepared to surrender to the State all that rightfully
belongs to the sphere of the individual, or of that civilised society which is at the
foundation of the State itself.

And yet, India has been thinking in terms of an essential democracy since the
beginning of recorded time. Even the Vedas, which are acknowledged to be the
oldest literary text of humanity, hail the democratic institutions called the Sabha and
the Samiti as the twin creations of Prajapati, implying that they are coeval with
civilised society. These popular bodies were already the organic parts of the earliest
Indian Constitution. The position of the Sovereign in the Hindu State belongs to
what is called the Dharma, while the Austinian sovereign is described as Danda, the
Executive, which enforces the Dharma. The Austinian Sovereign in Hindu polity
is not thus the source of Law, but rather its sanction and support. The sources of
Law are enumerated as Sruti (Veda), Smriti, Sishtachara (approved customs), and
decisions of the Parishad on doubtful points (judge-made law). The Law or Dharma
was, on principle, not uniform for all conditions, nor centralised. It varied with
groups and communities which legislated for themselves. The State, whether
Monarchy or Democracy, stood for the self-government of the Group. The groups
which were recognised for self-government by the State were known and arranged
in an ascending order as follows: Kula (Clan), Jati (Caste), Sreni (Guild), Samuha
(Corporation), Sangha (Community), Puga and Gana (Village Republic). These were
self-governing as regards legislation, justice, and executive functions, within their
own spheres. The State, subserving the ends of Dharma, believed in the free and
natural grouping of individuals and encouraged all kinds of association, voluntary,
local, or functional. Thus India became a land of self-governing groups and
communities, of local self-rule, limiting the absolutism of the Central Government.

The structure of this indigenous Hindu Swaraj is a consistent structure in all its
strata and layers, from top to bottom. If any section of it were taken anywhere,
it would show the same features of self-rule. There was no place in it for distinctions

172

THE POET (1912)

By the Courtesy of the Gainsborough Studio, London

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

between advanced and backward communities in respect of the privileges of self-rule
to which all were admitted equally, without any question of qualifications. The
machinery of government existed for man, and not man for the machinery. It was
so designed and devised that the more backward a community, the more was their
share of self-government, and of its blessings. Some of the Smritis or Hindu Law-
Books boldly lay down that ‘foresters are to be judged by foresters, merchants by
merchants, soldiers by soldiers, and villagers by their co-villagers.’ The Hindu
Polity did not believe in building up Swaraj only at the top. It built it up from
its foundation in a uniform structure. It went boldly to the villages and built them
up as self-contained republics, giving full scope to the growth of those social issues
upon which the unified national democracy fonctioning for the whole country as a
unit must ultimately rest.

It is to this native and nascent democracy of India that Tagore ralL us back
as the only means by which India can recover her lost soul against the invasion of
Western methods which suit the West better than the East and are the outcome of
different conditions of life and history. The future of India must be worked out
as far as possible in accordance with the established traditions of her long and glorious
past, and must not be shaped after the experiments of the West, like Socialism,
Communism and all their varied brood. Tagore is our first Preacher of the Gospel
of Non-co-operation whereby a Great Society, rich in its innate idealism and culture,
in the resources of the soul, but rendered moribund in the deadening grip of political
servitude, can achieve its freedom to preserve itself by the compelling methods of
organised Non-violence and Bloodless Revolution, The miniature picture of such a
society recovering its lost life and liberty is graphically presented by the Poet in his
masterly discourse on Swadeshi Samaj. The freedom of India will be within her
grasp if such vital centres of life and light, these local and social democracies, were to
spring up in their hundreds and thousands all over the country as visible exhibitions
of what Satyagraha and Ahimsa, Truth and Non-violence, can achieve against the
unyielding obstinacy of an alien autocracy.

THE UNIVERSITY, LUCKNOW

RADHA KUMUD MOOKERJI

NEED AND NO NEED

AH! Fortune’s slaves shed blood and tears ;
Whips tear their backs, curses their ears I

He felt no need of friend or roof,

Silken array or weather-proof.

Being so taken up with thought.

He to himself seemed all but naught.

Neither child nor mate did she require.

Nor rooms full of eyes which could but admire.
Being deep as joy in . . and fused with . , love
Heaven flowed through her around and above.

Of hand to hold, of arms to embrace.

Of thoughts . . of words . . bewinged with grace.
Of long life or of other place,

What need has Iris-flower of these.

Having colour and form for ecstasies?

Well may we weep, who, plunged in need.

Both for ourselves and others, bleed!

LONDON

T. STURGE MOORE

174

TAGORE. THE SUPREME COMPOSER

T he world knows Tagore through literature and philosophy. Yet his genius
is essentially musical. The rhythm o£ nausic supports his philosophy, its
melody permeates his prose, and its harmony orchestrates the numerous mani'
festations o£ his genius. Music completes his personality and thus per£ects his
artTorms. But this is not all. The Poet is the most original composer o£ music
that India has ever known. In number and richness, no less than in the delicacy
and suggestiveness o£ valuable moods, his songs £orm an excellent and inexhaustible
repertoire £or his people. We in Bengal get the best and the most o£ him through
his songs. Even a bird’s eye viev/ o£ the perspective o£ musical traditions in
Hindustan throws the musical achievements o£ Tagore in high relie£.

Hindustani music has two broad types, one o£ the Court, and another o£ the
People. The court-patronage o£ princes had always mingled with the religious
ardour o£ the people to maintain the continuity and enrich the quality o£ our music.
Whenever classical or court.-music was becoming dry, £ormal, and sophisticated, it
would gain £resh accession o£ li£e £rom the music o£ the countryside. Such accessions
o£ vigour had occurred in the Pathan and the Mughal periods o£ Indian History.
Usually, they came in the wake o£ the Bhakti-cult, which was always bringing
together different races, creeds, and cultures into its democratic £old. Even £ar into
the middle o£ the 19th Century, the two types o£ music were being blended into new
forms, e.g., Tappa and Thumri. The changes in folk-music were naturally more
slow and imperceptible. None the less they were real. But with the consolidation
of British rule, the middle class, consisting of the educated and professional people
on the one hand and of traders and commercial people on the other, began to
displace the patrons of the art, the aristocrats of the soil, from their station in society.
The new class were the pioneers of British rule, products of English education and
profiteers of Anglo-Indian trade. They owed no account to culture. National
traditions retired into the semi-feudal states which alone could be called Indian
India. The landed gentry, in their humble way, kept the flame burning. This
displacement was most apparent in Bengal which was the seat of the foreign culture,
foreign government, and foreign trade. The noblemen shut themselves in against
the vitalising influence of a contact with the new order of civilisation which the
foreign government had clumsily introduced. Being on a perpetual defensive, the
natural guardians of national culture could only insist on a punctilious observance of
forms and rituals. Thus it was that all artistic creation, specially its flower, music,
was languishing in this period of sheltered existence and mistrust on the part of the
natural upholders of native traditions, and of indiscriminate imitation of foreign
culture by those who battened on foreign rule and trade. At this crisis of Indian

175

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Culture, the Tagore family took the lead in the movement of creative assimilation
that had been initiated by Rajah Ram Mohun Roy. The movement was not
eclectic, a mere mechanical mixture of the best of both cultures. Old restrictions were
discarded, old ideals were re^valued, and new forms accepted and evolved. The
great work was well divided between the members of the Tagore household. The
Poet was the supreme artist in a family of artists. He had been accustomed to the
intricacies of classical music, the best exponents of which had then gravitated to the
new city in search of patronage by the newly rich. He had steeped himself equally
in the folk-music of the country-side in course of his constant excursions. His
family-surroundings, specially the sympathetic guidance of his brother, Jyotirindra-
nath, were congenial to the spirit of invention. In such a context, and with such
equipments, the Poet was eminently fitted to synthesise the classical and the folk-
types of our music into a unique style. His urge of creation was furnished by the
need of all life. He was the inheritor of the best of Indian and Western culture, he
interpreted freedom and joy of life as continuous initiative in the creation of human
values, he was the child of the new city and of the old village. In him were com¬
bined the sense of values of the aristocrat and the simplicity, directness and
universality of the child of the soil. No wonder that his songs are sung in the most
exclusive drawing-rooms, in the crowded market-places, and in the countryside of
Bengal.

And he plays on the whole gamut of human feelings with equal skill. The
myriad tones of religious emotion and love, of feeling for nature and man are all
touched surely and truly in his songs. He has not only struck the relevant emotions
in the schedule of the psychologist, he has produced and communicated new com¬
binations of feelings which have enriched the life of the devotee, the lover, the poet,
the humanist, the tiller of the soil and the vendor in the market-place. His songs
have made us feel in a new way, a richer way. They have entered into our
unconscious and conscious cerebration. They have passed into the parlance of the
soul. Each word, by its appropriateness, creates an eddy in the confused tide of
emotions, each phrase, by its precision, separates the currents, and the whole piece
canalises the stream of a novel emotion. There are many such streams which are
gathered in the dominant phase of the development of his personality. In one book
of songs, love, in another, nature, in a third, devotion is the theme. And when a
particular phase of emotion in a piece corresponds to that of the singer, the expres¬
sion becomes spontaneous and beautiful. His songs, thus rendered, do not demand
an artificial situation to which the singer has to respond by the display of sheer
technical skill. From the human point of view, the exposition of Classical Indian
music is a tour de force ; for expression is there a matter of technique, and emotions,
as we understand them, are conspicuous by their absence. Herein lies an original
trait of the Poet’s music. Rabindranath, even in his adaptations from the classical
style, evokes feelings through his language the adequacy and equality of status of

176

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

which to the new musical form is so complete that it creates automatically an
atmosphere for spontaneous expression. His songs are excellent poems and bear
recital. The same cannot be said of most classical pieces. He is a magician of the
language, and his songs are composed with due regard to the musical value of words
and phrases. The texture of his verse, i.e., its assonance and rhythm, its proper
arrangements of vowels and consonants, its beginnings, pauses, and ends are all in
tune with its music. The poetic value never jars with, in fact, almost invariably
supports the musical value. To him words come clothed in music and the two are
inseparable. It is by such happy combinations that emotions are generated and
reinforced.

All emotions are ultimately human emotions in the sense that they suffuse the
moods and feelings of the artist who creates or recreates, and of the artist who appre-
ciates. In verbal arrangement, the meaning, which must be common to all,
est ablishes a more or less immediate contact between the two. In a musical arrange^
ment the connection is remote on account of the absence of meaning. But when a
particular verbal sequence is in perfect accord with the sequence of notes, the
remoteness tends to disappear, and all is well for the emotional osmosis or contagion.
The glory of our classical music is its formal autonomy quarantined against the
contagion of emotions as we understand them. Tagore has abolished this quarantine
of formalities and humanised our music.

Naturally, the technique of the process of humanisation has to be simple and
direct. Hence Tagore’s tjechnique is severely economical. In his characteristic
songs his technical affinity is rather to the folk than to the court-music. His words
and melodies are familiar and yet beautiful. The elaborate flourishes which distin¬
guish the later developments of Indian music under sheltered court-patronage have
no place here. But the features of the so-called earlier classical type, viZ; ‘Dhrupad.’
which, in reality, was the folk-music of Gwalior and its neighbouring areas, are
retained throughout. The rigour and dignity of its composition, its division into
four movements, its linear quality or ‘Mirh,’ its modulation or ‘Murchhana,’ its
‘Gamak’ or sudden changes, and its freedom from flourishes or ‘Tans’ are very well
preserved in the earlier compositions. Though the classical purity of melodies is
somewhat ‘obscured’ in certain songs by a slight shifting of stress between the
important notes, the spirit is the same as ever. The rhythmic division of the earlier
pieces is generally of Dhrupad ; its slow, simple, majestic and dignified movement is
never obstructed or quickened in ill-conceived haste. But experiments are being
made concurrently. Generally, they are either blendings of melodies and rhythms,
rare or familiar, or adaptations of certain forms of folk-music. Even certain familiar
forms of instrumental music, e.g., Sitar, are commandeered. At this period, he is
not above adopting a few forms of European music, chiefly the operatic. He even
seeks to introduce harmony. His surging need for freedom creates new melodies
and rhythms, and liberates songs from their bond-slavery to beats. The result of

177

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

these technical experiments and innovations has been the creation of a unique style
of Indian music which is a thing of joy to all but the prejudiced. iThrough his
experiments many old techniques have survived, and many beautiful ones have
emerged. The purist may sing his songs with the developments that he thinks he
must needs introduce, he may sing without them, as the romanticist does in the way
indicated by the composer, and yet in both cases he will be free. And the ordinary
man renders them to the best of his abilities by imposing his own feelings on them
or by being emotionally charged by them. Such a variety of repertoire cannot
please all alike, yet all can draw on it with profit and joy.

Our music is not dead. It has grown, and grown by the usual procedure of
adaptation and assimilation. The history of our classical music is full of instances of
wholesale incorporations from local or folk'types, and personal contributions of
eminent artists. Provincial ‘Raginis,’ styles, even personal variations have well'
appointed niches in our Pantheon. And for one variety of Bilas Khan or Dhondi,
for five of Miyan Tansen, Tagore has a dozen. ‘Bangali’ is a ‘Ragini,' so is ‘Gurjari’
or ‘Deshi.* The objection to the novelty of Tagore’s creations in the face of the logic
of history is thus meaningless and rather late in the day. It is just possible that the
objection is too early, for the romantic of tO'day becomes the classic of to-morrow.
Besides, when Tagore’s creations are of such excellent musical value by themselves,
it is safe to prophesy that the life of Hindustani music is assured in his hands.
Nobody in the history of our music is the creator of so many beautiful varieties of
Bhairavi, Todi, Khambaj, Mallar, Kedar, Behag, Bahar, to take a few names. And
the new melodies which cannot be labelled are a legion. Tagore is in the main
line of traditions, urban and rural, but he stands where sophistication ends and
creative freedom begins. To one who takes a historical and a creative view of
culture, and whose ears are open to melodies other than the simply familiar and
customary, Tagore’s songs mark a new lease of life and herald in a new era for
Hindustani music. Once again, music is free, full of joy and related to human
personality in indissoluble ties.

THE UNIVERSITY, DHURJATI PRASAD MUKERJI

LUCKNOW

178

SANCTITY AND SOCIETY

T he course of social evolution clearly shows that religion has been an indispeii'
sable instrument which has aided man in his struggles of life; it has elicited
attitudes and modes of behaviour which have offered man easy guidance
m adjusting himself both to his environment and group. Religion in the highest
minds, where it is not conventional or institutional, has kept alive in society a fajth
in certain ultimate values which have guaranteed social progress towards higher levels.
.Such religious experience is familiarly known as mysticism. To many people
mysticism however suggests aberration rather than normal growth of personality.
This attitude is mainly due to a tendency often manifest among the psychologists to
view religious experience from a wrong perspective. Thus from James to Leuba what
is for the most part religious disease has been examined, though not without sympathy,
and the result has been that religion is either discredited or reduced to an illusion.
In all imaginative experience there are higher and lower levels ; and as we do not
condemn all art or poetry simply because there are found bad specimens we should
not decry mysticism by examining only its inferior or misguided phases. A study
of normal mystical experiences shows that the religious person with his greater sanity
and freedom orders his life better, and attains greater heights and depths of person-
ality than the ordinary person. So far as society is concerned, he is also a greater
asset in as much as being a better judge of what human nature really needs he discovers
the source of social values. In the religious person, social values re-incarnate them¬
selves ; in him the conflict of social ideals is completely resolved. It is he who leads
society towards that full harmony and complete concord, which he obtains from his
experience of God.

It is in the intimacies of relationships with a personal divinity that mystics
satisfy instincts of self-assertion, sex or paternal impulses, and develop a loyalty which
Professor Royce describes as a principle fit to be made the basis of a universal moral
code. The spirit of true loyalty is of its very essence a complete synthesis of the mor al
and of the religious interests. Now this loyalty springs from different relations
between God and the mystic, such, for instance, as when the mystic regards himself
as God's servant, as God's friend or comrade, as God’s son or, again, as elect bride ;
and therefore results in his different ethical attitudes towards society and the environ¬
ment. And, indeed, the loyalty entails a gradual organisation of the emotions so that
there is less psychic conflict, and man develops a permanent organised attitude which
is most in keeping with his social behaviour. Thus the danger that an emotional
abandon precludes social obligations is avoided. All religions emphasise different
kinds of loyalty, and historical traditions, myths or legends give direction and aim
to such loyalties.

179

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The mystic chooses different emotional approaches to God such as the attitude
of calm resignation, of consecrated service, of loving companionship, of paternal tender^
ness, or of passionate conjugal love; or rather his particular attitude towards God
expresses the fundamental needs of his own nature. As he empties his sub-conscious¬
ness, perhaps another attitude comes easily and thus the denizens of heaven are but
means for the fulfilment of his baulked desires and interests. It is to these that
his incipient responses are directed. As men come in touch with physical objects only
through their responses, their adaptive behaviour in relation to his symbols and ideal
constructions brings home to them the sense of their physical presence. Gods
and angels, and their friends and companions, like their adversaries such as demons
and spirits, thus make their presence felt and4:hese change their mood or behaviour
to suit the impulses and interests that have created them. This is the phenomenon
of communion in which the mystic is convinced of an impressive presence, more
concretely real than what his eyes see, his ears hear or his hands touch. Poulain
refers to this experience as follows: "There is a profound difference between thinking
of a person and feeling him near us, and so when we feel that some one is near us,
we say that we have an experimental knowledge of his presence. In the mystic state,
God is not satisfied merely to help us to think of Him, and to remind us of His
Presence. In a word. He makes us feel that we really enter into communication with
Him,” Now the difference between religious communion and dream or reverie which
similarly proceeds from man’s satisfaction in an ideal world of fundamental tendencies
of human nature, such as self-assertion, the needs for paternal fondness, for affection
and love, etc., is that divine beings blend together as large a number of impulses as
possible and hence are more stable and recur much oftener. Thus the mystic exhibitj
an organised or stable system of behaviour. This is facilitated by the fact that the
mystic concentrates his attention on the religious object or its attributes, and with effort
directs all his impulses and interests along one channel. For this reason the object of
worship not only gives greater consolation and joy but it also reveals itself to the
consciousness with much greater beauty and power than, for instance, the figures in
a day-dream or reverie, and hence the sense of its presence is more overwhelming.
While the dream or reverie spins out in an endless series of images, thoughts and
feelings eliciting behaviour without order and system, the mystic’s vision is composed
of more or less stable realities, which are true, good and beautiful, engendering certain
permanent attitudes. Such stable attitudes exhibited in the diverse relations of the
mystic to God as, for instance. His son. His servant. His comrade, or again, as His
chosen bride, organise all his emotions and sentiments into a harmonious pattern, and
thus his family, his kindred, his group come to possess a rich spiritual interest and
significance for him. The various emotional approaches to God engender the romance
and spirituality of motherhood, fatherhood, comradeship, or sex and weave in fine and
delicate texture the pattern of social bonds. Religion thus becomes a search for the
very substance of values, which have significance not merely for the mystic’s own

i8o

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

joy and complete living but also for the world of man. The Maha'Nirvana Tantra
frankly declares: “The image of God conceived by the mind is as helpless in securing
one’s salvation as a kingdom obtained in dream is in securing for him the kingship.
Those who worship earthen, wooden or stone images as gods labour in vain, as without
knowledge of Reality salvation cannot be obtained.” When the centre of mysticism
is an ideal realised in a person, such as a supreme historic figure like Christ or the
Buddha or a semi^historical figure like Rama-Chandra or Krishna portrayed in epics
and legends full of ethical suggestions, the loyalty to God also binds man to the
service of God in the world. Thus God not only vivifies the mystic’s heart and
satisfies his subconscious desires, giving him a peace that passeth all understanding,
but also serves to establish a new kinship of man with fellow-man and the forces of
nature. Such a life is possible only with strenuous effort. Indeed, the mystic cons¬
ciously and deliberately seeks an experience of ultimate values and it is his sense
cff difference between different kinds of values which rescues society from mal¬
adjustment and conflict of attitudes. It is the mystic who lives a most self-conscious
life, and it is his synthesis of ends and purposes in an ideal plane, which brings about
social harmony and is thus an essential condition of the stability and complex evolution
of society.

A religion of feeling through ecstatic experience which represents religion in its
most acute, intense and living stage accordingly offers a far better solution of the
ills of life than philosophy and metaphysics. The infinite worth of Man is stressed
and, what is more, men move fellow-men as objects of their worship. Man achieves a
cosmic gregariousness and life is regarded as a cosmic drama of loving finite spirits
all reciprocating in their mutual relation the infinite love of God. It is well-known
how the ancient monistic philosophy of the Vedanta was transformed in India by
religious mysticism which laid stress upon a community of souls in the unity of the
absolute life. The monistic position was not entirely given up. It was maintained
that God is infinite and at the same time a person, but the limitation of personality
does not apply to the case of God, whose infinitude of power can be felt by every
finite being. Love demands a sympathetic and synthetic response. Thus the finite
being is as much a requirement for God as God for the finite being. This idea is
neatly expressed in a Bengalee folk-song which reiterates that there is no salvation,
because love sees the equal reality and necessity of both the divine and the finite, and
holds each other in sweet, eternal communion. Rabindranath Tagore has translated
the song as follows: “It goes on blossoming for ages, the soul lotus, in which I am
bound, as well as thou, without escape. There is no end to the opening of its petals,
and the honey in it has such sweetness that thou like an enchanted bee canst never
desert it, and therefore thou art bound, and I am, and salvation is nowhere.”

THE UNIVERSITY, LUCKNOW

RADHA KAMAL MUKHERJEE

A CHORUS FROM THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF AESCHYLUS

[All living things and the whole world of nature suffer in pity for Prometheus, the
crucified champion of mankind.]

We sigh, O Prometheus, for the doom that lieth o’er thee;

Our soft'eyed rivers flow sobbing to the main
Through a mist of tears, lifted as in sacrifice before thee;

And dew is on my cheek for the world and its pain.

’Tis the new law of Zeus hath ordained this desolation;

And his sceptre, it is stern and unbent by supplication
To the remnant of the old Gods* reign.

For the whole Earth groaneth with travail of compassion;

And shapes of old beauty, which none before could see.

And powers of old greatness, are aching with thy passion.

For thee and for thy brethren, and the pride that used to be.

The multitudes afar, that in Asia have their dwelling
And sit in holy places, with strange tears are welling;

And the lips of them that perish pine for thee.

Yea, the Amazons, the dwellers beyond Phasis,

Who love not, who battle without fear;

And the hordes that wander in fierce places

At the world’s rim, the Scythians of the Mere :

And hard men, of Araby the flower.

Where the high crags of Caucasus advance.

They groan in their mcuntain^builded tower.

Amid great wrath and flashing of the lance.

The breakers of the sea clash and roar
Together, and the gulfs thereof are sore
With longing; there is murmur of hearts aching
In Hades and the Cavern of the Deep,

And the torrents of the hills, white^breaking.

For pity of thy pain weep and weep.

OXFORD GILBERT MURRAY

182

F or those who have grown up in the Tagore tradition in India it is a little
difficult to measure the great influence it has exercised on them and on
the country. I cannot venture to do so. But I wish to pay my deep homage
to one who has been as a beacon light to all of us, ever pointing to the finer and
nobler aspects of life and never allowing us to fall into the ruts which kill individuals
as well as nations. Nationalism, specially when it urges us to fight for freedom, is
noble and life-giving. But often it becomes a narrow creed, and limits and
encompasses its votaries and makes them forget the many-sidedness of life. But
Rabindranath Tagore has given to our nationalism the outlook of internationalism
and has enriched it with art and music and the magic of his words, so that it has
become the full-blooded emblem of India’s awakened spirit.

ALLAHABAD JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

PEACE

Dark in its channel which the grasses hide,

With living speed through marsh and desert flowing.

Thirty feet deep its waters curl and slide.

Almost without a whisper going.

Quiet things come and lap it with soft tongue.

Footstep by footstep through the silence creeping.

And starry leopards shine its reeds among.

When all but they and stars are sleeping.

It has no name among the streams of earth.

No proud explorer has its bearings given ;

Only the sun and moon watched at its birth.

And it has sucked the breasts of heaven.

In peace assured, these perilous lands between.

It will its waters to some deep deliver;

And had I been what I too might have been.

Then had my peace been like a river.

CENTRAL AFRICA HENRY W. NEVINSON

183

TO RABINDRANATH TAGORE

What a bird and flower leave unsung,

Thou shalt at once take up: symphony born, not fashioned.

Oh, to have thy song without art’s rebellion.

To see thy life gaining a simple force that is itself creation.

Oh, to be forgotten by the tyranny of intellect!

Thou biddest the minuet, chanson and fancies to be stopped.
The revels and masquerade to be closed;

Thou steppest down from a high throne
To sit by people in simple garb and speech.

In simplicity

Thou hast thine own emancipation ;

Let us be sure of our true selves.

There is no imagination where there is no reality;

To see life plain

Is a discovery or sensation.

I read in thee the problem of life and the world.

The twist of tears and joy.

The depth of space, the amplitude of time.

The circle of the universe in perfection ;

I read in thee our obedience to exigencies and law.

The real knowledge

That makes the inevitable turn to a song.

Exigency is only change of rhythm ;

Feeling the harmony
Makes us strict to the law.

Thy song looms above time and space,

A quality of psychical life not troubled by eternity or fashion ;—
The real touch ;—

The surprise.

Thy song is nothing but thyself.

I see before myself the busy feet of the wind.

Suggesting humanity and law.

The wind hastens

To the shadow whose passion lies;

Shall we go abroad and start anew, O wind.

To build again a better life and song?

184

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Thou, a light born of dream and hope,
Thou, singer of life’s thrill.

Let thy magic of meditation.

Thy witchery of song, play
On the vastness of silence!

TOKYO YONE NOGUCHI

VORREDE ZU DEM BUCHE “TAGORE’S BEKENNTNIS”
als Gruss an den Dichter und Weisen

I M Sommer 1930 besuchte Rabindranath Tagore unsere Philipps^Universitat in
Marburg und hielt uns den Vortrag uber seine Religion. Tief eindrucksvoll
war uns diese hohe Erscheinung edelen Ariertumes aus dem Osten in ihrer
Verbindung von Schlichtheit mit feinster Wiirde, von kiinstlerischer Formung mit
geistigem Gehalte, von umfassender Humanitat mit individuellster Pragung. Er gab
Zeugnis von “seiner Religion.” Was uns dabei den tiefsten Eindruck machte, war,
dass er weder religionswissenschaftliche Theorien vor uns ausbreiten, noch ein
abgekiirztes System indischer Glaubensweise vortragen, sondern rein sein persbnliches
Erleben darlegen und uns daran teilhaben lassen wollte— sein ganz persbnliches, das
von dieser Person und ihrer besonderen Art gar nicht abgezogen und allgemein
gemacht werden kann, das aber eben durch seine Eigenart und Unmittelbarkeit und
durch die Kraft seines Selbstausdruckes uns packcn und uns vor die Frage stellen
kann, was denn wir von religibser Erfahrung wissen und Eigenes haben und ob wir
etwas haben.

Um deswillen nehme ich mir die Freiheit, dieses Bekenntnis Tagore’s bekannt'
zumachen. Ich gedenke nicht, aus ihm Kapital zu schlagen fiir meine eigene
Theologie, noch es einzuordnen in meine religionstheoretischen Facher, Ich fiihle
erneut den spharenweiten Unterschied zwischen indischem Upanishadengeiste und
dem Geiste, der vom Boden Palastinas aus durch die Welt gegangen ist, und den
Unterschied der Religion des Dichters von der Religion biblischen Prophetentumes,
die die meine ist. Aber noch mehr fiihlte ich und fiihlten andere, die mit mir ihrer
christlichen Sonderart bewusst waren, die belebende Kraft der Beriihrung mit tiefem
persbnlichen Erfahren und den erfrischenden Reiz, der von ihr auf das eigene Wesen
geheimnisvoll weekend ausging.

Tagore weiss und bekennt sich frei von fremdher aufgedrangter und nur iiber-
nommener Fiihlensweise. Dennoch beruft er sich suf das Blut seiner vedischen
Vorfahren, das in seinen Adern fliesst, und auf die gleiche Weise des Erfahrens und
Deutens der Welt mit jenen. Und in der Tat wurzelt seine Art tief in seinem
eigenen indischen Boden und tragt seine Farbe. Man hat ihn aus englischen Dichtern
interpretieren wollen: man weiss nicht, dass er, wenn schon in moderner Weise doch

185

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

selber in gewissem Sinne Fortsetzer einer speziell bengalischen Dichterschule und'
tradition ist, um deren Bekanntmachung er selber die grbssten Verdienste hat. Aber
noch mehr: in der Tat lebt altes Upanishadengut in seinen Werken. Als ich ihn
bei seiner vorigen Reise durch Deutschland besuchte und in einem sehr persbnlichen
Zwiegesprache fragte, ob eine der alten heiligen Schriften Indiens eine besondere
Bedeutung fiir ihn gehabt babe und welche das sei, gab er eine Antwort, die ich
vermutet hatte. Er erzahlte, dass sein Vater unter den Upanishaden die Isa-
Upanishad besonders geschatzt babe, ihre Worte oft zitiert babe, sie mit ihm gelesen
babe, und dass der Geist gerade dieser feinen kleinen Schrift ihn selber am tiefsten
bewegt babe. Es ist ein Schauspiel von hohem Interesse, zu sehen, wie bier in der
Fat uraltes religioses Erleben sich erneuert in einer modernen Seele, und es ist dann
noch lehrreicher, zu sehen, wie sich altes Erbgut in einem Heutigen zugleich auch
wandelt, und wie es in einem Menschen ungewohnlich individueller Eigenart sich ganz
individuell gestaltet.

MARBURG RUDOLF OTTO

MESSAGE FROM BURMA

O N behalf of Burma and the Burmese Buddhist Community, I welcome the
Seventieth Birth Anniversary of one of India’s greatest sons, Dr. Rabindranath
Tagore. Through his services to humanity in manifold spheres he has given us
honour, and we honour him. We are proud of him and we are grateful for all that
he has done for us. As a messenger of peace and a missionary of human brotherhood,
he has travelled far and wide, and he has worked strenuously to bind the East and the
West together with the golden tie of Love. His life and ideals will long inspire all
workers in the cause of humanity.

Every thing spoken about him would be inadequate, if a word is not said about
his Visva-Bharati, the premier international educational centre of the East. It is
only a man like him who can bring together so many distinguished workers of
different countries of the world and harness their activities in the common cause of
cultural progress of all mankind and establishment of brotherhood and peace on earth.
Dr. Rabindranath Tagore is now old in age—though not in spirit. I wish him peace
and all happiness and bless him in the holy language of the Buddhists—

Bhavatu sabbamangalam rakkhantu sabbadevata,
Sabba-Buddhanubhavena sada satthi bhavantu te:
Sabba-Dhammanubhavena sada satthi bhavantu te:
Sabba-Sanghanubhavena sada satthi bhavantu te.

(BHIKKHU OTTAMA)

j86

TO RABINDRANATH TAGORE

I drink from you,

You fountain of the mountain.

You who gush up, rush down.

And wash smoothly the curb, marbly and verdant.

(Oh, your limpid garland, your festoons!

Oh, a moment of sun-glow!)

After a day of ample work, bending my form,

I soak my lips of ardent thirst in you.

In your crepuscular water immersed the Zenith’s profundity, .
In your abundant water delicious, clear and transparent.
Above your full flow

Lies the pale gold of the peace after a storm.

And from the rosy peak to peak, far away,

God’s flag of truce is trailing and waving.

The thousand preperceptions swell your bosom.

Especially at the end of a day.

You give yourself to the sacred dark of the night.
Resounding with your songs the eve full of expectations.

I drank from you, delicious fountain in the twilight,

You who conceive already the dawn of to-morrow.

And kneeling on the mosses sombre and soft,

I quaff and swill your pulsation of Life
Full of expectancy and birth.

Full of maternal joys of Creation.

TOKYO

KIHACHI OZAKI

Many happy returns.

TOKYO BARON OKURA

University of the Philippines extends heartiest greetings and best wishes.
MANILA RAFAEL PALMA

RABINDRANATH AND BENGAL

W HEN the British brought to us the inspiration and message of the modern
European culture, through the new English schools and colleges, established
under their auspices, Bengal unconsciously took to this culture, not as
something alien to its history and genius, but as a thing that had an inherent aflSnity
with these. This new European culture was pre'cminently the product of the
French Illumination with its ideal of freedom, equality and fraternity. These ideals
were not foreign to the history and spirit of Bengalee culture ; only the terms and
expressions and the social implications of the gospel of the French Revolution brought
to us by our British masters were new. The spirit was the same ; only the expression
was difEerent. This expression was certainly more rational and thorough than what
we had known before, in our own culture and history. The movement of revolt
resulting from the introduction of English education and European culture in Bengal
was therefore formal and not real. The reality behind it was an attempt on the
part of the spirit of Bengal to go back to itself and not to go out to Europe. From
the very beginning the modern movement in Bengal, though in its outer expression
a movement of revolt against existing religious faiths and social institutions, was
really in its soul and essence a movement of revival and return. Raja Ram Mohan
Roy was the Father of the new Renaissance in Bengal. To understand Rabindranath
we must understand Bengal as interpreted and represented by the Raja.

Rabindranath’s inheritances from Raja Ram Mohan were more direct and
intimate than those from the general thought and culture of his race and province.
The Raja was an intimate friend of Rabindranath’s grandfather Dwaraka Nath
Tagore, who was one of the trustees of the Raja’s Brahmo Samaj. Rabindranath’s
father Devendra Nath succeeded the Raja in the leadership of the Brahmo Samaj
Movement. Owing to these intimate associations Rabindranath grew up from his
very birth under the influences of the Brahmo Samaj or more correctly of that wing
of it of which his father was the Leader and Minister.

Nor can we ignore Rabindranath’s inheritances from his own family, the Tagores.
The Tagores of Calcutta have been the greatest representatives of the composite
Bengalee culture that developed under Moslem rule in Bengal. It was the com¬
posite culture which developed among us under the influence of the Moslem court.
Rabindranath s grand-father, Dwaraka Nath, was the first Bengalee Hindu (except
Raja Ram Mohan) to cross the ’black waters* in defiance of orthodox Hindu inter¬
diction and visited England and France, where he was received as a ‘Prince’ by the
highest classes of society. Rabindranath inherited the undeniable aristocratic mind
and manners, in the best sense of the terms, from his family. He is a democrat by
education, but really an aristocrat by nature, in the highest sense of the term.

i88

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Raja Ram Mohan had, however, one great limitation. He was not able to
appreciate or assimilate the thought and art of Bengal Vaishnavism. The Raja’s
theology was unmistakably filiated to the Sankara-Vedanta School more than to
the Vaishnava School of his own province. It was really no fault of the Raja. The
Vaishnavas of Bengal were feebly posted in the philosophy of their own denomina^
tion. The movement of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu committed a great blunder
by adopting the popular Krishna legend as vehicle both of their religion and their
art. It helped certainly to popularise the externals of the Vaishnava propaganda in
Bengal. But, on the other hand, this Krishna legend overwhelmed the rational
theology and the emotional spirituality of our Vaishnavic cult and culture to such an
extent that these became a bye-word among the higher classes of the Bengalee Hindu
community, dominated by the rival Sakti Cult. The theology of the Sakti Cult was
clearly based upon the Sankara-Vedanta Monism. The central note of the Sakti
culture is the Cult of the Mother, or the Universal Mother, or Mahamaya, or the
creative energy of Brahman. The popular image-worship of the Sakti Cult has
been openly regarded as symbolic only and designed for the education of the
unillumined. When the Truth is realised and the devotee becomes conscious of his
identity with Brahman, all these lower cults and cultures drop off like the slough of
the snakes. The exuberant emotionalism of this Mother Cult was also protected
by the very conception of the Divine Mother from those vulgar sensualities by which
Vaishnavic piety and art in Bengal were notoriously overwhelmed at the hands of the
unillumined crowd. All these have been responsible for Raja Ram Mohan’s lack of
understanding and appreciation of the theology and art of Bengal Vaishnavism. In
fact, the Movement of Sri Chaitanya needed the message of Raja Ram Mohan for
its highest self-fulfilment. Unfortunately, the Brahmo Samaj under Rabindranath’s
father Devendra Nath failed to realise this essential aspect of its own mission. It
strove to take back modern India to the Upanishads, condemning the subsequent
evolution of Hindu thought and culture of what is called the Pauranic Age as
evidences of degeneration and arrested development.

Rabindranath’s theology is inspired by the teachings of his own father.
Rabindranath’s God is the God of the Upanishads. His father’s faith was a living
faith in a Personal God. It was Faith and not really philosophy or theology. The
Upanishads proclaim the immanence of God. Whatever is, is Brahman. Side by
side with this they also declare what may be called the transcendence of God.
Brahman is in everything, yet Brahman is in nothing. He permeates all, and stands
beyond all. The philosophy of the Upanishads is really the philosophy of the
Unknown and the Unknowable.

Art, like that of Rabindranath’s, could not possibly grow on a soil like this.
Fortunately, however, Rabindranath’s philosophy like the theology of his father is
really not agnostic but essentially theistic. And in the development of this theistic
art, Rabindranath has drawn, though unconsciously, to a very large extent upon the

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

realisations of Vaishnavic art. Vaishnavic art of Bengal or more accurately the
Vaishnavic lyrics have developed around the Radha-Krishna legend. Rabindranath
has not followed the Vaishnava poets of Bengal in this. But the reality behind the
Radha-Krishna legend is the reality of universal human experience. In his religious
creations Rabindranath has more or less worked upon these universal human
experiences without any specific human materials or symbols. Such materials and
symbols would not appeal to the modern mind, either in India or any other country.
But the modern man feels exhausted by the barrenness of logical deductions and
inductions and philosophical abstractions and generalisations of modern thought.
It has been groping after a Personal God, established by philosophy, and capable of
being tested and enjoyed by poetry. Rabindranath’s Gitanjali gave to the
modern man just the thing which, consciously or unconsciously, and more un-
consciously than consciously, he was hankering after. It is real without being
sensuous, and ideal without being abstract.

But the depth, the grandeur, the power and the superb beauty of Rabindranath’s
creations can never be brought out in translations. One must read and study them
in the original to appraise the genius and art of Rabindranath correctly. No other
Indian province could produce a Rabindranath. No Indian vernacular except the
Bengalee could supply the material for his art'crcations. The wealth of diction, the
music of sound, that characterise Rabindranath’s poems, are the special contribution
of his mother'tongue. Rabindranath had mastered both the spirit and the form of
the Vaishnava lyrics of Bengal in his early youth. His Bhanusinher Padavali or
Poems of Bhanusinha are the clearest possible evidences of it. M, Madhusudan Datta
also tried his hand in composing modem lyrics after the manner of the mediaeval
Vaishnavas, but he failed woefully, because he never made himself familiar with
Vaishnava lyrics as Rabindranath had done. Madhusudan’s diction is more classical.
His vocabulary is far more Sanskrit than Bengalee. Rabindranath, however, is
intensely a Bengalee in both. Rabindranath has demonstrated as much by his poetic
creations as by his prose style the great wealth of the Bengalee language. True it is
that Bengal had no prose literature worthy of the name before Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
But the material for building up a high-class literature, both in prose and poetry, have
been present even in our mediaeval Bengalee lexicon. These materials were waiting
a master builder. That builder came in Rabindranath, And the greatest
contribution of Rabindranath is this, namely, that he has secured a place for his
provincial thought and literature in the world-thought and world-literature of our
day.

He has built upon our old foundations. Our old Vaishnava art, though
unsurpassed in its own line, was, however, narrow in its outlook. The four rasas
with which Bengal Vaishnava lyrics deal do not exhaust the whole range of man’s
emotional life and experience. These four rasas, namely, (i) the romance of the
servitor and master or subject and king, or sons and daughters and parents relation.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

called the dasya rasa, (ii) the romance of friendship, (m) the romance of the parental
affection, and (iv) the romance of the man and woman or the hero and heroine
relation in poetry and drama, which have been delineated with unrivalled skill by our
Vaishnava poets, do not exhaust the whole range of man’s romantic experience.
These rasas are romances of our domestic and communal life. The modern man lives
an almost infinitely larger life to-day. His relations expand far beyond his family
or his community, or even his own country. He is bound up to-day in a net of
relations, economic and commercial, political and cultural, that covers the whole of
humanity. These many-sided relations are not without their own romances. The^e
romantic experiences of the modern man are not included in or exhausted by the
four old Vaishnavic rasas. Yet the general characteristic of rasa or romance is present
in all these relations, as they are in the old Vaishnavic delineation. Rabindranath
has lifted our old lyrics from the narrow groove in which they are confined by our
Vaishnava poets. The romantic love of one’s own country, the yearning for national
freedom, the passion for Universal Humanity—these are the special creations in our
national lyrics of Rabindranath. By these he has helped to universalise what was
special and particular in the poetic creations of his predecessors. Rabindranath
tlierefore is not only the poet of modern Bengal but he is equally the poet, in a special
sense, of the modern man all the world over.

He is also the prophet of the nev/ age. His denunciation of modern nationalism
marks him out as the prophet of that Internationalism towards which the whole
world is unmistakably advancing. The word of the history and evolution of the
last century, as Lord Morley once pointed out, was nationalism. That nationalism
has already done its work. The word of the history and evolution of the present
century is Internationalism. And Rabindranath stands in the very forefront of the
prophets of this internationalism.

In all this Rabindranath is, above all, a Bengalee. In his philosophy he has
worked to bring the ancient theosophy of the Upanishads to the modern man. In
his poetic creations he has brought the realisations of the mediaeval Vaishnava and
Sakta worshippers of Bengal to the most advanced modern plane. In his protest
against the spirit of current nationalism, which has been a call to universal war, and
in his message of that Universal Humanity wherein every national group must seek
and find the highest fulfilment of their legitimate national freedom, which must
replace current competitions by universal co-operation—Rabindranath has tried to
fulfil the mission of that Universal Religion for which Raja Ram Mohan strove. In
all these he represents, in a very special measure, the genius and culture of his own
people and province.

CALCUTTA

BIPIN CHANDRA PAL

AN RABINDRANATH .TAGORE

Welche Botschaft kann uns das gwaltige Indien sagen?

Es gibt keine grossere, als seinen Verzicht au£ jede Gewalt ausser der das Geistes.
Und welche Predigt kann Indien uns geben, die wir der Mahnung bediirftig sind?
Keine eindringlichere, als den Gesang der Freiheit in wohllautenden Strophen,
mit denen uns der Sanger entziichte als er Gast in unsercm Lande war und wir
kamen, um ihn zu sehen.

Wir werden uns seiner hohen Gestalt und seines strahlendes Gesichtes erinnern.
Denn wir sind aus der Vorstellungskraft und aus der unendlichen Macht desselben
Schbpfers hervorgegangen.

FRANKFURT'AM'MAIN ALFONS PACQUET

FROM THE Y. M. C. A.

O N behalf of the National Council of the Y.M.C.A.’s of India, Burma, and Ceylon,
and for myself personally, I send our felicitations, on the occasion of the 70th
birthday of the Poet. We thank God for his long life and for his great
service to the people of India in the realms of Religion, Education and Literature.
There are few people who have not received inspiration and enlightenment from his
works and from his personality. He has raised India high in the estimation of the
world, and we pray God that He may spare him yet for many years of health and
strength in order that he may continue his great work.

CALCUTTA H. A. POPLEY

192

TAGORE AND THE LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH

I T is unnecessary to emphasise that, at least so far as Hindu India is concerned, there
is, in spite of much apparent diversity, a unity of culture which transcends
provincial boundaries and ethnological divisions. The widespread influence of
religious, cultural and social movements even in medieval India, when communica¬
tions were not so easy as at the present time and contact between peoples was more
difficult, has been recognised to be a matter of unique significance. The Saiva
Siddhanta of the Tamils has had repercussions even in far off Kashmir. The
philosophical speculations of Sankara ^dfected the thought and religious life of the
whole of India. The Vaishnava movement which originated with Ramanuja
penetrated far and wide and was responsible for an outburst of literary and religious
activity such as India has but seldom witnessed. In our own day, owing to the
complexity of national life and the emphasis attached to political movements, this
re-unification of Indian thought has not been properly understood. But it is
undoubted that the work of such reformers and thinkers as Raja Rammohun Roy,
Swami Vivekananda and Swami Dayananda has profoundly modified the thought
and life of not merely the provinces and areas they worked in but the whole of Hindu
India. The modernism of the Madras Presidency acknowledges its inspiration from
Brahmo thought.

If in religious and social activity this unity is still a living fact, it is much more
so in the realm of literature and art. The different languages of India, whether they
be Prakritic or Dravidian in origin, have all been nourished by the traditions of
Sanskrit. The result is that the humanism of these literatures is fundamentally the
same. Their forms of thought, their general attitude towards life and the culture
they reflect are not in any way different. The modern influences that are shaping
their development are also the same. They are in fact the many voices of a single
living civilisation. In consequence, a literary movement of importance in one
language imperceptibly affects and inspires the development of all others. This fact,
which should have been obvious but for the political pre-occupations of modern India,
only became clear with the; rise of Rabindranath Tagore as a world-poet.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

That Tagore should have become naturalised or adopted in the literatures of
North India was perhaps inevitable. After all Vidyapati, Kabir, Mirabai, Tulasidas
and Nanak have become the poets not merely of Maithili, Hindi or Panjabi but of
India. In the same manner, because of his being the most outstanding exponent
of Indian humanism, Tagore was bound to become not merely the laureate of Bengali,
but equally of Hindi and other North Indian languages. His direct influence, how-
ever, has not stopped as in the case of Kabir and others with the Vindhyas. If tO'day
a Malayali or Tamilian were asked as to who was the leading literary force in their
respective languages, the answer would undoubtedly be Tagore. It is not that the
writings of Tagore have found widespread popularity among the masses in the Tamil
country or in Malabar. It is undoubtedly true that his works are popular with all
classes. But it is not this popularity which gives him his predominant influence in
the artistic creations of the South. It is the new life he represents, the new force to
which he has given expression, the new humanism of which he is the prophet in
India. Tagore represents a creative literary force which has shown to the vernaculars
of the South the prospect of a new life freed from the leaden weight of encrusted
tradition.

The unique example of this influence of Tagore in a Southern language is the
case of the great Malayalam poet Vallathol. A poet of rare genius and a scholar of
great repute in Sanskrit, Vallathol was till 1914 a blind votary of the classical tradi'
tion who wrote verses as acrobatic feats in words. He had written a Mahakavya in
the manner of Sisupala'vadha of Magha, translated the whole of Valmiki’s
Ramayana and devoted himself entirely to the cultivation of unreality in art. His
works had no relation to the intellectual or emotional life of the people for whom he
wrote. In 1913 the new light of Tagore dawned on him. The transformation in
him was slow, but within the next five years Vallathol had become what no other
poet of Malabar had ever been, the leader of an intellectual and artistic movement
embracing not merely literature but music, art and dancing. He began to be
influenced by the new life that surged around him and became in fact identified with
every movement meant for the emancipation of Indian thought. But his main
interest lay always in the regeneration of art in its varied forms. That movement
which had its origin in Vallathol has so grown in momentum that it can legitimately
be said to represent the intellectual renaissance of Malabar.

Vallathol’s poetry also underwent a fundamental transformation. No longer
was he interested in elaborating puerile conceits with the help of a highly complica¬
ted technique or in fulfilling rigidly the canons laid down by the rhetoricians of
Sanskrit; instead, he began to give exquisite and sensitive expression to the life of
his own people, to their spiritual aspirations and to their artistic impulses. Nor was
this influence confined to him. The younger generation, already up in arms against
the rigid and unreal classicism of the poets and writers of the time, hailed him as

194

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

their leader, with the result that the Malayalam language to-day is being directed by
the unseen hand of Tagore and the forces he has set in motion.

It is significant that this movement which has naturalised Tagore in the South
has not been confined to literature. The Malabar renaissance is perhaps better studied
in the extraordinary revival of drama and dancing. Here also Vallathol is the
leader and chief protagonist. When once the vision came to him of the unity of all
arts and the inter-dependence of their interpretation, it became clear that, if Malabar
was to develop a culture of its own, it must revive the fast dying traditions of its
arts. Himself a dramatist and actor, he has devoted the last ten years of his life
with single-minded devotion to this purpose. The Kerala Kala Mandalam which
he has founded is an institution which strives to revitalise the arts of Kerala and to
give new and modern direction to her creative impulses. It has already achieved
remarkable results in regard to a special and unique form of classical dancing and
drama known as Katha Kali. Katha Kali was once the national art of Kerala.
Owing mainly to the decadence of taste following upon the soulless education of our
colleges, it was fast dying out, both as a profession and as an art. Vallathol has not
merely rescued it from almost complete oblivion but re-established it in popular
favour. He established under the auspices of the Kerala Kala Mandalam a training
school for Katha Kali actors and recruited to the profession young men of education
and social standing. It is perhaps interesting to note that Tagore was so impressed
by this development that he sent one of his own students for training in the School
under Vallathol.

The popularity of ‘the Tagore School' in the literatures of South India is by no
means a passing fashion; in fact it has held the field for over 15 years now. It is
true that much of what has been produced under the impetus of this movement has
nothing in common with the poetry of Tagore. None the less they are in the main
the outcome of the forces generated by the personality of Tagore and are in varying
degrees the reflections of the same inspiration and light which came first to him
among the writers of modern India. Tagore is a world-poet in the universality of
his appeal, in the message which it conveys to all without difference of race, colour
or creed; but to us he is essentially the poet of India, the inspired singer of songs
who has shown a new way in literature, who has opened up new vistas of life and
thought. The literatures of the South have drawn freely from his inspiration
and their life has been rendered more varied, rich and beautiful by his influence.
Thus he has once again unified the intellectual life of India, in the same manner,
if not to the same extent, as Sankara, Ramanuja and Chaitanya and the other saints
of earlier days.

BHOPAL K. M. PANIKKAR

»95

FROM V. O. K. S.

My Warmest Greetings to Rabindranath Tagore.

Dear Poet, I wish you continued happy years of creative work, benefiting India
and humanity. Cultural workers of U. S. S. R. wish all success to your great educa¬
tional work for renascent India.

MOSCOW PETROV

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA

M any a time, in the course of uncounted centuries of the history of mankind,
the dream of 'the golden age’, of general happiness and of the reign of justice
has flashed upon the mind of poets and visionaries who rose above their time
and above the narrow interest of class. Such visions served as materials for the poets
who are allowed to dream as long as they arc not called for action and fight for a
better order.

Thus a new class grew up and organised itself with the aim of creating a new
society based on justice, and guaranteeing the untramelled and unchecked progress of
humanity. This burning passion moved them to greatest struggles and noblest
sacrifices.

The most wide-awake and advanced section are waging a ceaseless war for the
triumph of a better life. But what are its characteristics? A man belonging to
this new order is ‘one who lives a full life, completely developed, and ever ready to
do everything’; he is a man of maximum creative activity ; free and joyous, he con¬
secrates his work to the welfare of the great whole. He is the true soldier, ever
disciplined and enthusiastic, keen on sweeping away all class distinctions and aspiring
to construct the future society; he is a man of real culture, a culture which looks
with contempt on idlers, exploiters and oppressors of the working people, a culture
which makes a man a true comrade and a reliable friend of all oppressed and exploited
human beings and equipped with all the resources of human science, art and
technology.

There are many impediments in the path of the attainment of this aim, the
principal being the legacies of the old order. Therefore, our first task is to get rid of
old habits and old customs of ownership. We are trying also to sweep away the
religious superstitions; and to fight the interested class within the Church who are
the pillars of exploitation and allies of the oppressers of all the wide world.

196

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The vast multitudes are for the first time being attended to by innumerable
education organisations. In 193it over twenty^two millions of illiterate adults are
under instruction; fourteen millions are studying in primary schools, while huge
crowds are flocking to the lower, the middle and higher professional schools.
Thousands of libraries, museums, picture houses, and theatres have been built and
are working as educational agencies. Lastly, there are about four millions of children
pioneers who are our partners in this great movement and acting as a tremendous
educational factor in the creation of the new society.

The Soviet system of education and upbringing is also being carefully adapted
to the varied requirements of the national culture of our two hundred nations living
in U.S.S.R. New alphabets are being created, new types of schools are being
constructed, national language, national literature and art are being encouraged every¬
where in the same old Russia which for many ages was a synonym for savagery,
stupidity and superstitions. And in this transition from the capitalistic to collectivist
regime, we hope to bring about a fundamental reconstruction of the whole order
through literature and science, art and education.

No less striking and original is the method of Soviet education ; it has definitely
broken with the passive methods and has made the people an active collaborator of
his teacher. The methods of the Dalton plan, purified of their bourgeois indivi¬
dualistic character, are freely used.

But the most characteristic trait of our education is the inseparable connection
between culture and its collective utilisation which we called Politechniquism.
rhere is no fatal break between mental and physical work—one of the most degrading
traits of capitalistic society. Hence Politechniquism occupies one of the most
important places in our fight for the destruction of class distinctions. Getting
acquainted in theory and practice with all the main branches of industries, the
young generation gets used from their teens to a common fight and a common
programme of reconstruction.

These hosts of men and women, old and young, of these vast countries are
made to acquire and appreciate all that is precious in the old culture. They remember
the words of their leader Lenin, who advised them ‘to acquire and to utilise all that
was valuable in the two thousand year old history of the development of human
thought and culture.’ Thus they learn gradually to realise the unity and homoge¬
neity of the workers of the world over, gaining thereby a truly international education.

MOSCOW ALBERT E. PINKEVITCH

197

BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY

W HEN we in the West hear the name Rabindranath Tagore, we think at once
of the marriage of Poetry and Religion: Poetry ennobled by spiritual
content, Religion adorned with the irresistible appeal of Beauty. The
combined product thus emerging is a symbolism and a mysticism which speaks directly
to man’s heart and mind, and which draws its strength from all of the great religions.
It may, therefore, be not inappropriate, in a volume such as this, to devote a few
pages to a comparison of two of the greatest of these religions and their respective
contributions to man’s spiritual needs.

What at first seems an insuperable difficulty in making such a comparison as
I propose is the fact that neither Buddhism nor Christianity is capable of exact
definition. Only a part of any great religion is to be found in its teachings; and
even if, in our study, we should confine ourselves to the teachings of Buddhism and
Christianity, we should find that these have varied and evolved and assumed
innumerable forms in the many centuries of gradual growth that both have gone
through. And if we confine our attention to the religions as they exist to-day, we
are confronted with the great division in Christianity between Protestantism and
Catholicism, and the even more striking contrast between Southern Buddhism and
Northern. In spite of all this, however, I am willing to assent to the general agree¬
ment that Buddhism means something and that Christianity means something; and
if this is really the case, some sort of significant comparison ought to be possible.

Let us, then, consider some of the more important characteristics which these
great and noble religions have in common. Among the first that springs to one’s
mind is the attack they both make upon the sins of the flesh and upon selfishness,
which they both regard as the root of all evil. Corresponding to this negation of
sin, there goes in both religions a positive emphasis upon pity for the suffering and
love for all. And here we must note that the love and pity of Buddhism has a wider
extension than that of Christianity: for the Christian teaching limits this interest
to humanity, while Buddhism takes within the fold of its sympathy and tenderness
every form of sentient animal life. Within the human realm both religions carry
the ideal of love to the extreme limits of accepting death in the service of others, of
returning good for evil, and of loving one’s enemy as one’s self.

In contrast to the moral systems of some of the other great religions, these two
pierce beneath the surface of man’s acts and its consequences to man’s will and his
motives. While others look upon the outer appearances. Buddhism and Christianity
look upon the heart. Both of them consider the inner life of man his true life, and
both seek to cultivate it in their followers. And if we turn from the inward side of
ethics to the outer, to the fundamental principle of righteousness, I think it could be

198

THE golden book OF TAGORE

shown (though I confess not without considerable argument) that both religions, in
the last analysis, identify the good life with the rational life, the life that can be
justified by reason, the life that gives itself to the production of the greatest amount
of genuine spiritual values in oneself and in others.

The effect of both religions upon their loyal and obedient followers is a peace
that passeth understanding and a joy that the world can neither give nor take away.
There is, to be sure, some difference between them here. The characteristic state of
the Buddhist saint is peace: that of the Christian saint is joy. Yet the Christian
certainly has peace, and no one can read the ecstatic expressions of many Buddhists
who have followed in the footsteps of their Master without realizing that a certain
quiet and lasting joy is theirs.

It is in their effects upon the moral and hedonic lives of their followers that the
two religions are most at one. Yet in their cosmic teachings they are not wholly
divided. At least we may say this much: both of them tend to be pessimistic about
a mere cross section of the world—the world of sin and selfishness—but both are
essentially optimistic about Reality as a whole. For both of them the Universe,
taken in its entirety, is essentially moral. The moral laws are the fundamental laws
of being. Mahayana or Northern Buddhism would, moreover, go farther with
Christianity than this: for the loving and mighty Amida Buddha, the central figure
of many of its sects, is much the same kind of personal deity as the Christian God.

But with these similarities there go certain equally interesting, though not
equally important, divergencies. Buddhism, like Christianity, emphasizes the will,
but in the cultivation of the moral life it lays more stress than does Protestant
Christianity upon discipline, training, habit formation. The perfection of one’s own
inner moral character is something which one must be working at all the time by
conscious and systematic processes. Consequent upon this, there is in Buddhist
morality a certain stiffness and self-consciousness, and a corresponding lack of that
spontaneous abandon in the service of a great cause which is the very aroma of so
much of the noblest Christian morality. The follower of the Buddha must be very
intent on his every act, word, and thought, lest carelessness sully his carefully culti¬
vated character ? but while this is also often true of second-hand Christians, one who
has been with Jesus is so devoted to a larger self than his petty one that he thinks
but little of his own precious moral character, and with Wilberforce may for long
periods forget that he has a soul. Noble deeds spring from him as spontaneously and
beautifully as roses from a rose plant, and with as little deliberation.

Both Christianity and Buddhism teach the individual to seek his own moral
perfecting and the welfare of society: but Hinayana Buddhism certainly stresses the
individual, while Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity stress (at least in theory)
the social. The Buddhism of the Founder as it is preserved (and doubtless consider¬
ably changed) in the Canon has a decidedly monastic coloring, and while it is positive
as well as negative, stresses the negative virtues more than does Christianity. This,

199

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

and a certain moral self'centredness, follow almost inevitably from the most
important of the Four Noble Truths namely, that the great source of sorrow is desire.
To kill out desire is thus one of the great aims of Hinayana Buddhism, for only thus
can sorrow be avoided. And in this connection is to be seen another contrast
between Christianity and the Hinayana, viZ; in the attitudes they take toward
sorrow. Hinayana Buddhism is almost morbidly afraid of it. At all events it
wishes to play safe. Christianity has something of the typical Western willingness
to take a chance, and if worst comes to worst, it will not fear sorrow but make use of
it. It is not without significance that of these two religions one has chosen as its
supreme symbol and ideal the figure of a sage plunged in deep meditation and perfect
calm: the other the form of a young man dying upon a cross, in which supreme
suffering is present, but present to be overcome by love. I should hasten to add
that in the matters here discussed, Mahayana or Northern Buddhism takes a position
much more like that of Christianity. The typical Mahayana saint acquires merit
in order to present it, vicariously, to others, and he would be willing even to sin if
thereby he could help any other sentient creature in the moral pilgrimage.

In their attitudes toward cosmic or metaphysical matters there is, as I have said,
more contrast between the two religions than on questions of ethics. And briefly
put, Christianity is essentially theistic, the Hinayana agnostic, and the Mahayana
monistic or pantheistic. Personality is not highly prized in Buddhism. If it exist
at all, it is something to be ultimately got over, something to be at last surrendered
for the prize of entering into a larger spiritual unity. And while Amida Buddha is
presented to the religious imagination in personal terms, back of the personal Amida,
as back of all the Buddhas in their particular aspects, stands the impersonal Divine as
such, the Buddha Nature which is in us all.

Partly as a result of this less personal and more inclusive view of the Divine,
partly as a result of its carelessness of history and of particular finite events, Buddhism
is less dependent upon historical facts, is freer from authority, and better able to adapt
itself to all sorts of scientific discoveries and changing philosophical conceptions than
is Christianity. This elasticity, this adaptability toward many kinds of philosophical
ideals and toward many kinds of human superstitions and human needs has made it
and its mother, Hinduism, unique among the religions of the world.

One more similarity and contrast let me note before closing this comparison.
These two religions possess the inestimable advantage of having for their Founders
perhaps the two noblest figures in history. In many ways their aims and their
characters closely resembled each other. Yet here, too, and in the effect which the
thought of them has upon their followers, there are contrasts as well as similarities.
Jesus is the intense and even youthful lover of the soul: Gotama the calm and
thoughtful sage. In Jesus’ presence one feels the infinite love of God; in Gotama’s
the depth of supernal wisdom. Each makes his great appeal, but each to a separate
type of mind. To many the thought of the Buddha is cold and uninspiring, while

200

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

the influence o£ falling in love with Jesus has been the source of more transformation
of the moral life than any other single thing in history. Yet there is also a type
of mind to which the very youth and intensity and personal charm of Jesus is some-
thing of a detraction, and for which the supreme inspiration is the image of the great
saint and sage of India. A similar contrast persists if we turn our eyes from the two
historical figures, and focus them upon the philosophical figures into which Christian
and Buddhist thoughts have transformed Jesus and Gotama. .The Logos of ChriS'
tianity is the Second Person of the Trinity, but He is a person still, the living Christ,
interested in you and me as individuals. The Eternal Buddha is the Absolute Mind
inclusive of all that is, of which you and I are eternally aspects or parts; for the
Buddha Nature is in all things.

The contrasts I have pointed out between the two religions make it plain, I
think, that the followers of each of them are mistaken when they assert (as they so
often do) that their own religion contains all the values of both. The truth is that
each of them has its own peculiar genius, each has its own contribution to make.
And this not merely because they represent different forms of philosophy but also
because there are many different kinds of people in this world, and each of the great
religions makes its appeal only to certain types. Not all human bodies need the
same kind of physical food, and not all human souls need the same kind of spiritual
food. I think it probable that Christianity is adapted to the needs of more people
than Buddhism—though this is only a guess. But I feel sure that there are many
men and women, both in Buddhist lands and in Christian lands, who find, or would
find, in the less personal, more cosmic attitude of Buddhism, a form of spiritual
nourishment which would appeal more to their imagination, satisfy more fully their
emotional needs, feed more lastingly their souls than anything which Christianity
as ordinarily interpreted has to give.

If the conclusions to which we have come are justified, it would seem to be
manifest that this old world of ours needs both Christianity and Buddhism, that it
would be poorer if deprived of either one of them. For I am convinced not only
that both these religions have contributed much and still contribute much of inestim'
able value to the life of man, but that if either of them should die out of the world,
the peculiar and characteristic contributions which it makes could never be exactly
replaced. The contribution to man's life which the historical religions are making
in these centuries that we are living through, and probably in all those to come,
consists not in abstract conceptions of ethics or metaphysics. Such conceptions they
doubtless possess and teach, but these if forgotten could be restored by man’s abstract
intellect. What religion does is to translate the abstract into the concrete, reason
into life, to make the ideals of ethics into burning motives of human conduct, to
transform philosophical concepts into beckoning vistas and shining inspirations, to
make the Eternal Word become Flesh. This miracle of incarnation religion achieves
very largely by its appeal to the imagination and through the use of symbols. To

201

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

many a man for whom the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God has little lure, the
loving Buddha and the living Christ will speak in irresistible tones. The personal
touch within the realm of the imagination still has an immense power over most of
those brought up in the Buddhist or the Christian tradition. The pov/er of tradition
in this matter is inestimable, and once the tradition is broken it can never be restored.

The great loss which the race would suffer should these traditions cease will be
better appreciated if we think for a moment of the force possessed by religious symbols.
Much of the magic by which the great religions incarnate truth into life, they owe to
the peculiar power of ancient symbols over the imagination and the emotions. Let
one compare the efEect of some abstract ethical or metaphysical teaching with the
influence of the crucifix or the thought of the Madonna on a good Catholic or of the
Buddha image or the Goddess of Mercy on a good Buddhist, and he will see what
I mean. And what is true of these great symbols is only in less degree true of the
many lesser symbols, visual and verbal, of both these religions. For most men and
women the great truths of philosophy become living and compelling guides only
when handed on by a revered tradition and clothed in traditional symbols. For such
symbols and such traditions carry with them the immense force of the Community
and the austere grandeur of the Past, and thus they get a grip on the mind of the young
child which he never wholly loses. They get this power over the mind, however,
only if they begin their action while the mind is still very young. The full power
of religious tradition and of religious symbols can never be felt save by one who has
thus breathed them in with his earliest breath, they speak with the assurance and
authority of the sacred Past, of the great days from which they sprang. This old
world of ours will probably have to get on with the stock of religious symbols and
traditions it already possesses. Those which it loses will be forever irreplaceable.
I cannot but think Emerson too optimistic when he sings;

‘One accent of the Holy Ghost
This careless world has never lost.’

I may be wrong in this so far as my judgment of the Past is concerned, but at any
rate I feel sure of two things; that much of the spiritual heritage of mankind is at
stake ; and that those who out of religious zeal in any camp seek to destroy any of
the great religions of man are sinning against the Holy Ghost.

The world’s need to-day is not the destruction of the old faiths and the old
symbols, but the deepening of them. And for the answer to this need we turn, not
primarily to the priests or to the scholars, but to the men of insight, who can teach
us to unite the love of Beauty with the love of God. And so we come back to the
point from which we started, and to the Poet to whom this volume is a tribute.

WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS., U.S.A. JAMES BISSETT PRATT

202

TAGORE AS AN INTERNATIONAL FIGURE

T he multiplicity of human dialects is a barrier to international appreciation even
in the field of the exact sciences. This is so in spite of the fact that a little
knowledge goes a long way in following the language of a scientific paper. To
appreciate humour or pathos or to appraise literary merit in a work is a very different
matter. Science uses language merely to convey information. Literature makes
with words a garment which half covers and half displays the subtleties of human
thought. It follows that international fame in the field of letters and in the field
of science stand on a wholly different footing. It is unbelievable that a great
scientific discovery could to-day be made in one country and remain long unknown
to the rest of the world. But it is perfecdy possible for a great man of letters or
a great philosopher to remain entirely unknown outside his own country. For a
whole millennium, Europe knew nothing of Kalidasa or Sankaracharya. It discovered
Tagore when he chose to translate some of the Gitanjali poems ‘to while away the
time.’ The discovery was complete when Sweden crowned with the Nobel award
his ‘profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful poetry, and the consummate skill with
v/hich he introduced his poetic thought in English guise to the literature of the
West.’

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Tagore’s great international fame
rests only on such of his writings as have found their way into other languages from
the original Bengali. It would be more correct to say that it is the rare charm of
his personality and his human qualities which have won for him the high place he
holds in the esteem and affection of mankind. In the course of his extensive travels,
he has left behind him everywhere personal memories which are cherished and
treasured. His simplicity and dignity, his varied gifts in literature, art and music,
and his fine sense for all that is true and good and beautiful are some of the hall-marks
of his greatness which are patent to all. That the world claims him to-day as one
of the greatest of living men admits of no manner of doubt.

THE UNIVERSITY, CHANDRASEKHARA VENKATA RAMAN

CALCUTTA

203

POET, PATRIOT AND PROPHET

I T is a very happy event that we are celebrating tO'day, the seventieth birthday of
our distinguished countryman, Rabindranath Tagore; for in this unfortunate
land of ours, where so many of our most gifted men have been cut off before
they reached their maturity, we deem it an especial grace that our country’s pride,
the world'renowned Rabindranath, should have been spared to us so long and should
still be able to uplift and inspire us with his marvellous poesy and wonderful
idealism ; and it is the heart-felt prayer of all of us, his admiring countrymen, that
Providence do spare him for us yet for many a year to come, to delight us all with
the fragrance of his rare personality.

It has been also a happy idea that in order to celebrate the septuagenary of the
birth of our Poet, a volume of symposia is being brought out which will contain
tributes in honour of the great Poet from East and West alike. But I cannot say
that it has been an equally happy inspiration on the part of the organizers of this
commemorating volume to have asked me, a prosaic Chemist, a mere man of science,
to pay my humble mite of tribute to the great Poet, perhaps the greatest Man of
Imagination now living: not that I yield to anyone in my admiration for our great
countryman, but only that what I may have to say about him will be merely
commonplace. For I can only admire and revere Tagore’s wonderful personality,
and immensely enjoy his writings; and am quite content with that admiration and
reverence and enjoyment ? I have neither the desire nor the temerity to play the role
of the critic or the assayer. And I shall accordingly content myself with giving
expression to that feeling of admiration for the Poet that surges within my breast.

I think I can make bold to assert that it is impossible for any foreigner to realise
what Tagore means to Bengal. Tagore's age now is three score years and ten, and
he began to sing and enchant from when he was in his teens, and before he was
thirty he had already made his mark as one of Bengal’s leading Poets—so that it is
for a period of half a century and more that Bengal has known and enjoyed and
marvelled at her inimitable Bard. Go where you will, in the most outlying areas of
Bengal’s far-flung frontiers, in the deepest recesses of Bengal's most insignificant
hamlets, you will hear the enthralling strains of Rabindranath hummed by the
village swain and the rustic maiden. Many of these innocent village folks do not
know whose songs they are, but they know the words and the tunes of the songs
well enough, and burst into them spontaneously when emotion seizes them.
Tagore’s songs and lyrics have entered into the very texture of the life of modern
Bengal, and have coloured the very outlook of modern Bengali society in all its
strata, high and low alike. It is indeed difificult at the present day to visualize Bengal
without Rabindranath’s inspiration.

204

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

.There are many reasons for this. The first and foremost reason to my mind
appears to be this, that steeped as Rabindranath is in the best elements of Western
culture, he is still essentially the scion of the great Vaishnavic Bards of Bengal, that
immortal band of singers from Jayadeva through Vidyapati and Chandidas to Jnanadas
and Govindadas who raised the emotion of Bengal to the pinnacle of religious exalta-
tion and swept her off her feet with entrancing melodies woven round the eternal
loves of Radha and Krishna on the storied banks of the sacred Yamuna—and for all
his Western veneer Rabindranath is at heart the child of that tradition which stirred
Bengal’s emotional depths as nothing else ever did. And thus it is that Tagore’s
love songs, Tagore’s religious songs—and many of them, true to Vaishnavic type,
are both—have carried by storm the heart of Bengal. On the top of this ever-
responsive chord in the Bengali heart, Tagore has won Bengal by touching another
chord also dear to her, and that has been his enthusiasm for the natural scenery of
our countryside, his poetic idealisation of the beauties of rural Bengal, his intimate
sympathy with the simple joys and sorrows of the average Bengali household—these
have endeared him and made the humblest Bengalis feel him as one of their very own,
despite the fact that Rabindranath belongs to one of the most exclusive and aristo¬
cratic families of Bengal, cultured, city-bred and prosperous. This spirit of oneness
and identification with, the Bengali home that breathes through his inimitable short
stories, this fervour for Mother Bengal which inspires his immortal song:

'srWir c^ofsrfTj i

'srWT,

or the song—

and other equally famous songs will keep the memory of Bengal’s Poet ever green
and fresh in the heart of Bengal, even when his more intellectual productions may
have been forgotten, except by the learned few.

This brings us to another aspect of Rabindranath’s personality. His worship
of the motherland did not exhaust itself in mere sentimental effusions over her
natural beauties or her glorious past—his patriotism had a more virile and construc¬
tive aspect. And this explains why when there surged over Bengal in 1905 the
waves of an awakened self-consciousness and nationalism, Rabindranath was found
in the very forefront of the national movement, inspiring it with his soul-stirring
national songs, stabilizing the emotional excitement with his thoughtful discourses,
instinct with the spirit of constructive nationalism, elevating the movement out of
the rut of sordid materialism and blind race-hatred by the momentum of his catholic
idealism. When the beautiful Rakhi'bandhan ceremony was instituted to affirm

205

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

the unity of Bengal inspite of official fiats, it was Rabindranath who pronounced its
mantra.

TirrSt,

^‘fi cf I

If Surendranath Banerjea represented the practical side, and Bipin Chandra Pal and
Aravinda Ghosh the passionate side, Rabindranath Tagore incarnated the idealistic
side of the new Indian nationalism. When in course of a few years out of the fumes
of the Swadeshi movement emerged the spectre of terrorism, Rabindranath uttered
his solemn voice of warning, pointing out that this new phenomenon was alien to
the spirit of Indian culture and would lead the country to a morass from which it
would be difficult to emerge unscathed. It was in those stirring days that the
masculine prose of Rabindranath’s pen burst forth in its splendid virility, and almost
eclipsed the Poet himself. And I can say with the deepest conviction that the
patriotic young man of the present day cannot do better than study the magnificent
discourses of Rabindranath of a quarter of a century ago, his Swadeshi Samaj, his
Desha'nayak, his Samasya, his Path 0 Patheya and other pieces now published in the
collections Raja-Praja, Swadesh, Samaj and Samuha ; if the young man does it he will
equip himself far more effectively for political life than by idly imbibing the inane
froth that issues out of the daily press to-day.

But in the heyday of national resurgence few people are in a mood to listen to
sober reason or to regulate their conduct by idealistic standards ; and so Rabindranath
felt himself more and more isolated from the main currents of the active nationalist
movement, and came to realise that a Poet can indeed inspire Nationalism but can
hardly hope to control it when once started on its impetuous career—a Poet's place
is not in the rough and tumble of political struggle, but the Poet’s soul, like a star,
must dwell apart. And so, disillusioned and disappointed at the turn things were
taking, Tagore withdrew unto himself and began to develop the third phase of his
moral unfoldment. Growing sick of the aggressive and exclusive type of nationalism,
he began to pine after international fellowship, to realize the essential solidarity of
mankind, and to preach the gospel of universal humanity. The small educational
experiment that he had been conducting at Santiniketan in Bolpur developed under
the stress of this idea into the Visva-bharati, an international university which would
give the widest scope to human culture, both of the East and the West, and would
offer a meeting-ground of world-renowned savants of all races and climes. This
drew out Rabindranath the educationist; and in his own peculiar domain—on the
poetic plane—it gave us the Rabindranath of the Gitanjali. The spirit of catholicity,
of idealism, of universal humanism that pervaded the series of poems at once
arrested the attention of the civilized world, and the award of the Nobel Prize for

206

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Literature in 1913 was the natural sequel. From being the Bard of Bengal, from
being the prophet of Indian Nationalism, Rabindranath now emerged as a world'
figure, a seer and an apostle of international fellowship and human solidarity.
Curiously enough, the very year after Rabindranath appeared on the world’s stage
with a new message of love and fellowship, there burst upon the world the greatest
cataclysm of recent history, the Great World'War. The war dragged on its weary
length from year’s end to year’s end, drawing into its vortex more and yet more
countries, until after welLnigh five years of unexampled carnage some sort of peace
was patched up at Versailles by a shattered and war'weary world. The Great War
was the reductio ad ahsurdum of the doctrine of aggressive nationalism and rampant
Chauvinism against the danger of which Tagore had raised his warning voice in
Bengal many years before. And so to the war'weary world the message of Tagore,
the gospel of love and fellowship and co'operation, fell like a soothing balm, like a
healing enchantment, and was felt to be the only evangel of hope for suffering
humanity. And all Europe and America felt, when this Eastern sage appeared in
their midst with his gospel of hope and faith and charity and they vied with one
another to do him honour, that once again the ancient words had come true.
Ex Oriente Lux,

And we, his admiring and loving countrymen, felt elated and proud that our
Rabindranath, our own darling poet, whose songs had nourished and inspired
generations of our young men and women, the prophet and poet of our own nascent
nationalism, had at last met with his due recognition at the hands of the entire
civilized world, and had been acclaimed as one of the seers of universal humanity, as
one of the band of the Elect whose names are jewels that “on the stretched fore'
finger of time sparkle for ever.’’ And our feelings were those beautifully expressed
in our own Oriental adage: ^ and it is this feeling that

permeates us still—the feeling of national pride, the feeling of intense thankfulness
that even in these days when our hapless land is beset with so many perils and is
confronted with so many difficulties and is suffering from so many ills, our mother'
land has still been able to produce a son like Rabindranath, worthy to sit side by side
with Valmiki, with Vyasa, with Kalidasa, the glorious bards of this ancient land,
and worthy to rank with the World’s Immortals. These are my feelings on this
solemn occasion and I can say no more, and can only close with the prayer—the
ancient prayer of our Aryan sages—

JOcT WU: II

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF SCIENCE, PRAPHULLA CHANDRA RAY

CALCUTTA

207

TAGORE. GANDHI, AND NATIONALISM

Y ears ago I happened to be a guest at a dinner given by some university
men in New York, and the conversation turned on the political servitude
of India. I argued that the crucifixion of India’s political body had
enabled her to discover and develop her soul and evidenced Tagore's Gitanjali as
proof, to which a professor of philosophy retorted:—‘That means I have got
a sensation because somebody has given me a knock on the head and I gladly
resign myself to foreign knocks because of the sensations they evoke.’ I replied
that the natural gift of Negroes (and our untouchables) for music was probably due
to their sufferings, and quoted: ‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
thought.’ Jesus Christ was a man of sorrows and a nation of sorrows may yet be
the source of a gospel of international salvation. It was a few days after this dinner
that the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Rabindranath Tagore was
announced, and I triumphantly pointed to it as a startling justification of my
contention.

About the year 1908, the chief vogue of Tagore in the Andhra Desa was as the
stirring laureate of Indian nationalism. The country can never forget the way in
which he inspired and roused us to active patriotism. But the call of the universal
was to his sensitive soul a living command ; he has since then progressed from Nation^
alism to Humanity, subordinating all particularisms to the higher Absolute Values,
without however impugning their relative and temporary validity. This phase
marks his highest reach as poet and seer and has revolutionised the spirit and tone of
the best modern Andhra Poetry.

Tagore’s powerful condemnation of the state as a soulless machine and the
patriotism that grounds itself on ‘My country right or wrong’ to the negation of
moral ideals, has stirred the conscience of the world, horrified at its own terrible doings
in the Great War. His call to regulate life on the principle of humanity has been
talcen up by Romain RoUand and other western thinkers. But the subject nations of
the East have not found much consolation in that doctrine, since obviously it is only
the imperialist nations that could take the initiative and illustrate the new direction.
Japan, ever fearful that the fate of the other Oriental nations may yet befall her, and
China struggling fitfully for nationhood have derided it as the philosophy of defeatism.
India with her longing for freedom, still feeble and ineffective, has not been able to
accept this dispensation. ‘Religion is not for empty bellies,’ said the divine Rama-
krishna Paramahamsa. In similar wise humanitarian ardour is not for slaves, nor
internationalism for those who are no nation. The higher should be a synthesis or
federation of nationalities and if race and colour barriers arc in process of time dissolved,
there may be a growth into world-state through absorption and assimilation.

208

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

But have not the Imperialist Powers marie a hopeful response to this irieal of
human ferier^ lon? I think they have. iThe League of Nations is the emboriiment,
in however feeble and tentative a form, of this higher spirit of international co-opera¬
tion. The oldest of the races, India, through the intuition of her imaginative genius,
Tagore, invoked the idea, and the youngest of the nations, America, through her
President, Woodrow Wilson, organised it into institutional shape and potency. What
a miracle of ideal co-operation! More than any other poet of the world, Tagore
shines forth as the laureate of humanity.

It does not mean that he is not a patriot, or that he is one of those artistic or
scientific exquisites who profess to be above patriotism chiefly for pleasing the
Government, or that he condemns nationalism and the state as evils per se to be
destroyed root and branch. The noble heart, that flung his knighthood in contempt
back into the hands that gave it to him because they had become blood-stained at
Jaliianwallah Bagh, the generous soul that more recently emerged from its ecstatic
retirement to bemoan the Chittagong happenings and resent the Hijli shootings, can¬
not for a moment be thought to be a less ardent patriot than Das, Nehru, or Ansari.
What he condemns is the claim (alas, widely conceded) of the state to be an end m
itself and a law unto itself, in brutal disregard of ethical standards, reducing itself to
a non-moral animal impulse. Just as the family has in course of evolution been
subordinated to society, and is no longer an interest overriding all other considerations,
so must the state be subordinated to humanity. A nation should be just one member
in the larger society of the family of nations and the Fatherhood of God must lie
implemented by the brotherhood of Man. And just as a family must be healthy and
efficient in order to subserve successfully social ends, so must each nation be strong
and efficient in order to fulfil its humanitarian functions properly. The state should
be content to occupy the position of a means to world ends, instead of continuing to
be a lawless exhibition of greed and force.

Is Gandhian Nationalism any different from this in essence and spirit? It seems
to me that the Tagorean mirror contains a faithful reflection of the Gandhian
universe. Or to put it differently, in its insistence on Truth and Non-violence, and
the subordination of political ends' and methods to moral laws. Gandhism may almost
be said to be an organised form of Tagorism. India must be free, not that she may
thereupon roam about like a beast of prey, but that she may the better subserve human
brotherhood and culture. And she must achieve her freedom by means of Truth
and Non-violence, historically speaking novelties never before tried; by invoking
and never by inflicting suffering; by converting the enemy and getting him to be
your friend instead of exterminating him ; and melting his heart in the fire of world's
pity and righteousness. And it follows as day the night that freedom thus won is
bound to be used for spreading a regime of light and love, and not for perpetuating
dark deeds of exploitation. Nor is it only blood that may not be shed. Uncompen¬
sated sweat too may not be, and the capitalism that has thriven on the ill paid sweat

209

the golden book OE TAGORE

o£ the labouring masses must melt into co-operative eflEort. In fact even tears are
forbidden ; for you must undergo your sufferings with a quiet, bravely and cheerfully,
like martyrs. Then only will its transfigurative efforts be forthcoming.

I wonder if Soviet Russia is not in many of its aspects a true answer to
Gandhian prayers, the organised and institutionalised form of his social and moral
ideals. It is ready to disarm completely; clan is its regulative category, not
country ; it has abolished the exploitation of the masses; it is a knight-errant ready
to march against the many-headed Hydra of imperialism ; it is no respector of race
and colour; its patriotism is subordinate to the world-proletariat; and it is univer-
salistic in idea and intention. Only it is not prepared to lose its life by meekly
practising non-violence against its enemies, a human weakness which may be
forgiven.

But Gandhi is for the ascetic life, the life of minimum needs and requirements,
since these could be more easily shared equally by all than the life rich in manifold
pleasures and satisfactions. The perfect life is the ideal of Tagore, the primitive of
Mahatma Gandhi. Community in fasting is more easily secured than community
in feasting, and how could a man of heart feast in the midst of so much starvation?
Such cultural and aesthetic (in the best sense of the term) life as the world has
enjoyed so far has, it must be confessed, rested on the exploitation of the many by
the few. Artistic and philosophic Greece rested on slavery, and indeed held that
without slavery the best life would not be possible. Religious and philosophic India
turned exploitation into its chief Dharma, and fashioned castes as well as outcasts
for this purpose. European civilisation has divided society into capital and labour,
into classes and masses. Every man of God, unless he be worshipping the Devil
under that respectable pseudonym, must revolt against this iniquitous negation of
human brotherhood, Gandhi’s revolt, in despair at making all equally rich, would
like them to be equally poor in material goods and exalted in spirit. He would have
no machinery, no large industry, no palaces, but just neat little cottages and the
restless Charkha. Tagore's intuition is the truer and it may yet be realised con¬
sistently with the demands of our conscience. Though as history has gone so far the
ideal of the full life has not been consistent with the moral ideal of equalitarean
co-operation, the great Russian experiment has shown that material prosperity and
human equality could go together and that asceticism is not the indispensable basis
of socialism. Its new social and economic order, its marvellous powers in education
and the broad-casting of the amenities of civilisation, and its five-year plan, demons¬
trate the possibility of the communistic achievement of the perfect life, where light,
love and joy will in widest commonalty be spread. Meanwhile until this divine
consummation is reached by the world, Mahatma Gandhi as the great man of action,
the reviver and inspirer of our jaded national will, and the organiser of mass action
on a scale almost miraculous, will rightly hold the primacy in our affections as well

210

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

as admiration. He is will; he is action ; he is life ; and there are more than idea and
imagination.

I have had the honour of knowing Rabindranath Tagore in person,
and can never forget the impression he made during his visit to Mysore in 1918.
After completing his tour in South India he told me that nothing healthy could grow
under the shadow of our temples. He revealed to us the beauty that Kalidasa
and other ancient poets found in the forest where the hermits had their dwellings
(Tapovanas), South Indian music was an intellectual exercise, barren of heart and
soul. The music of Bengal penetrates the heart and quickens the soul. I can confirm
the truth of this contrast by personal experience of both. If Bengal has a soul, fiery,
reckless, and generous to a fault, part of the explanation may be found in its stirring,
emotional music. And Tagore’s creation of the Visva'Bharati I What perfect
insight does it not show into the nature of university education, which should be
research and creation and the development of personality, and not, as the government
universities are, distributing channels for the scanty, muddy, slow, belated flow of
western knowledge and discoveries.

Tagore’s name will live as long as humanity lasts. To have been the glory of
India is indeed^ a great triumph ; but he is more, he is one of the lights of the world.

MADRAS C. R. REDDY

A l’occasion du yo-eme Anniversaire de la Naissance de I’illustre Poete Rabindra^
nath Tagore et de la publication de The Golden Book of Tagore, je suis
heureux d’apporter I’hommage de mon admiration au grand ecrivain, au
delicat artiste qui a cisele avec tant de finesse et d’harmonie le Naufrage, le
Jardinier d’Amour, la Fugitive, Mashi; au grand Hindou qui a toujours defendu
eloquemment les aspirations da son peuple; a I’homme dont les creations et les mani¬
festations les plus diverses dans tous les domaines de la pensee, la hauteur et I’indepen-
dance de caractere, rendront son nom immortel.

PARIS ERNEST RENAULD

211

TAGORE THE SEER AND INTERPRETER

W HEN Zarathushtra (in one of the older books of the East) asked Ahura what his
name was he gave two in reply, which are remarkable—the Seer or
‘Discerner’ and the ‘Healer.’ They would serve well, it has been said,
to mark the functions which Rabindranath Tagore made his own in that later phase
of his career, when the trouble of his days had made him more keenly alive to the
needs of men and women in India all the world over. His temperament, his love
of Nature, and the life of meditation that the Indian sun favours, might have led
him to retire from the struggle for the new order. A sharper force drove him to
look to the ailment of his time, and he became, instead of its ascetic, or its hermit in
the wilderness, its Healer, its Discerner, and its Interpreter.

He did it by the simplest magic of heart and mind, such as poets and children
know. When you talk to him, and walk in the sun with him, you learn the secret.
You see how by the divination of the heart he learnt to join together two spirits,
two faiths, two regions. India and Indian faith and divine philosophy have often
seemed immensely far away from ours j not touched by the affectionate piety and
the feeling as of a mother to her children, or the intimate faith of a St. Francis.
But in Tagore you feel the humanity that was in the Son of Man, comforting the
children of light in their awe of the Eternal. In him the spirits of the Upanishads
reach the same threshold. It was natural that out of a living belief in the beauty
of the earth, in sun and stars, and in the waters below, there should grow a living
faith such as Rabindranath Tagore has expounded in Sadhana, The test of its
truth for him is that, living by it, and dowered by Nature to enjoy life to the full,
he has found the medicine to heal the troubles of his own day. He is able to
speak so naturally to us in this country, because he came an early pilgrim to our
shores. In youth he went like some of the old Buddhistic pilgrims on a long and
arduous journey into our outer world, saw for himself the spectacle of our Western
civilization, and what it was doing for good and evil; and he felt those forces of
today which are affecting his own country, too, at times, and seeming to threaten the
secret faith in which his songs were sung and his books sent into the world.

Thus he has been not only a seer, but the herald of the new Dawn that we
hope means the New Day for our two allied regions and our two troubled
civilizations.

LONDON ERNEST RHYS

212

STRONGHOLDS OF CULTURE

I T may seem to some that the questions of Culture which preoccupied the human
mind since times immemorial, are already strongholds. As if entire cities and
countries accepted Culture. As if our times can in self'content look back upon
those far far distant, those poor ones, who had neither telephones, nor radio and
were even deprived of moving pictures. What a self'conceited error! And how
few understand that Culture as such dwells only upon the summits, and the ways
to these strongholds of the human ascent of spirit are as before unusually difficult, and
who knows may be even still more difficult than in some previous epochs. Our
ships are very swift. Somebody wanted to construct a ship of 100,000 tons. It
would be instructive to know what were his intentions as to the quality of the
cargo for shipment. Were not guns and opium meant for the sake of profit? Our
houses are rising high. Somebody builds a house 100 storeys high—much higher
than the Tower of Babel. However, often in living quarters there is room lacking
either for a desk or a bookcase. Very roomy are our slaughter houses. Thanks to
an unusual technique hundred thousand animals can be slaughtered, but at the same
time in modesty and almost unknown remain the researches of scientists about
vegetable vitamines. With all our so'called education few will innerly agree that a
lemon or orange can replace a bloody beefsteak. Only recently even the seemingly
learned physicians sent their patients to the slaughter houses that they should be able
to drink the still warm blood. The very same physicians advised as the most
curative means to devour like beasts raw bloody meat. But even in those countries
where according to conditions of nature aborigines are compelled to use only raw
meat since ancient tim.es, they act wisely eating it either dried in air or in an extreme
case they use it smoked.

Our mechanical technique applied all efforts to produce as many robots as
possible. True, even robots often fell into mechanical madness and disturbed the
traffic of the world. Somebody invented a mechanical salesman for shops and the
next inventor enlivened the lips of the machine with the mechanical ‘Thank you!'
But in response to mechanization are bom armies of unemployed. Is this the
achievement of Culture?

Only recently we brought cannons into churches for benediction. However,
any discussion on peace and religion became in Society something unbefitting and
shameful. Should somebody dare instead of the ugly one'sided sport, instead of
slander and calumny, to speak of the uplifting principles of Culture, the well brought'
up people, with a shrug of their shoulders would whisper, ‘How dull he is.’ And if
somebody upon entering a drawing room would dare to make a sacred sign of his
own religion, he would simply be considered not only badly bred, but a crass bigot

213

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

as well. The questions of religion and spirit, the questions of Culture are removed
for the appeasing of ignorance into abstraction. If everything uplifting is made
abstract, it means we are as if not responsible for it. In the best case people will
excuse themselves through routine, everyday’s work, which as if hinder them to
turn to the uplifting foundations of the spirit. So often it is thought of, forgetting
that everyday’s labour is the benevolent pranayama. It creates energy, it brings us
nearer to the cosmic rhythm, it helps us kindle the inner fires: these benevolent links
with the spacial Agni. So often we find self-vindications! We are very far-
fetching in avoiding responsibility, forgetting thus that the great responsibility for
the condition of the entire planet is unavoidable there where human distinction is
attained. Does not this distinction oblige one to apply all powers to find the
corresponding rhythm of evolution? It obliges one to think how not to find oneself
in the cosmic refuse. This is not abstraction. Verily, this is vivid reality as true
as Existence itself! And do not we freely choose either disintegration or creation,
negation or affirmation, creativeness or dealiness? Does not the entire history of
humanity point out the highest bliss of creative thought in whatever form expressed
and wherever manifested? The great examples of history display to us unusual
creators of thought who either clad it in some material or broadly proclaimed it by
spatial megaphone. If all is one, then is not all interrelated, as expressed since long
in the wisdom? We reiterate the sacred hymns of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Psalms
about the indestructibility, about all-conquering spirit, but often in chanting we
lose the understanding that the expressed wisdom is given for immediate application.

Does not Culture imperatively demand this immediate application in life of all
beautiful which we ourselves send into the exile of abstraction? The condition of the
planet is such that either a true approach to evolution will be found or a spiritual
savageness threatens. The great Agni will either awaken the most blissful force
or will tensify the most wondrous energies or if not admitted by our spirit will turn
to ashes of destruction the illusory Maya which we in self-conceit mistake for a basic
stronghold. Either we shall once again realize the grandeur and immutable necessity
of the Hierarchy of Bliss ; or in savageness we shall reject every conception of Teacher
and noble leadership of the Guru.

If the strongholds of Culture crown as always only the heights, withstanding
all difficulties of a thorny and stony path, how then must we be grateful to all those
who have taken upon themselves the strain of the leadership to Culture. And with
what care must we safeguard the walls of these strongholds created by untiring every¬
day’s labor. How we must bless those who kinffie and sustain our enthusiasm.
When we think of Invincible energy, blessed enthusiasm, pure Culture, before me
always rises the so dear to me image of Rabindranath Tagore. Great must be the
potentiality of his spirit which prompts him to apply untiringly in life the founda¬
tions of true Culture. The songs of Tagore are inspired calls to Culture, they are
his prayers about great Culture, his blessings to the seeker of the paths of ascent.

214

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Synthetizing his immense activities, which ascend the very same mountain of Bliss
and which penetrate into the narrowest alleys of life, could any one abstain from the
feeling of inspiring joy? So blissful, so beautiful is the essence of the hymns, the
calls and works of Tagore.

Verily Santiniketan is growing like the tree of Culture. We cannot judge
how a powerful tree grows, why its branches are spreading in one or another order.
Under the conditions of winds or other conditions of nature, we would find an
explanation, but it is important for our spirit to realize that this tree is growing; or,
according to the language of the stronghold, it is important that the walls are being
strengthened. And we know that these walls are constructed in the name of Culture,
and they exist only through Culture. Is it not sacredly-joyous, the feeling which
overwhelms us, looking at the eternal snows of the Himalayas, saturated with the
miraculously acting dust from the far-off worlds, to realize that now in our midst
lives Rabindranath Tagore; that seven decades he glorifies and praises untiringly
the Beautiful, and tirelessly he accumulates the eternal stones of Culture, erecting
the stronghold of joy of the human spirit? This is so urgent! This is no undefer^
rably needed! Let us repeat untiringly about the necessity of the strongholds of
Culture. Let us tirelessly proclaim this true pride of a nation and of the entire
world.

The strongholds of Culture like magnets gather all which pertains to Culture,
and, like anchors, keep the ships of spirit, which toss in the stormy ocean of the
elements.

Tagore lives for the glory of Culture. Let Santiniketan stand as a guiding
milestone for the growth of the human spirit, as a construction of the most needed,
the most noble and most beautiful.

Vijaya Tagore! Vijaya Santiniketan!

URUSVATI, KULU, NICHOLAS ROERICH

HIMALAYAS

215

SONNET IN BENGALI BY MRS. KAMINI ROY

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[translation]

In the rose flush of the eastern sky
When Rabindra rose as the morning sun.

The nymphs of heaven sang paeans of victory ;
Knowing him by his voice, Bengal opened her eyes
And cried in the gladness of her heart,

‘What light I What song! songdit—

This is my own Sun, and the Gods have given him
‘As a solace for my many ills.'

As the day grew, higher and higher wheeled
His chariot of light; in a hundred streams
Flowed nectar ; the world, looking heaven-ward.
Saw the dazzling sun in the meridian ;—

Bengal’s or India’s, who can tell?

This day the world acclaims Rabi as its own poet.

CALCUTTA

[transliteration]

Kavi Ravi

Snigdha-rakta-rag rathe purab ambare
balarun-rupe jabe Ravindra-uday,
uthechila dig-vadhu gahi ‘jay, jay’ ;
heri tare, cini tare tar kantha-sware,
meli ankhi kahe Vafiga anander bhare,

‘e ki alo ! e ki gan ! giti-jyotirmmay
e je go amari Ravi, ar karo nay ;
dila Vidhi sarvva dainya bhulabar tare.’
jata vela bade, urddhwa ha’te urddhwatar
cale tar alo-rath, jhare 5ata-dhare
amrta barasa, vi5wa cahi nabhah pane
here madhyikaSe ravi, apurvva, bhaswar.
Vanger, ki Bharater, ke kahibe tare?

Ravi jagater kavi aj ke na jane?

Sri Kamini Ray

KAMINI ROY

217

W HAT can I say of Rabindranath? Homage has been paid him by the East
and by the West. Wherever he has passed—and what lands has he not
visited?—garlands have been hung about his neck and men and women
have taken the dust from his feet.

Few men have lived to know such fame as he has won. His books are read in
every tongue; throughout India his songs are sung. In Europe and America his
name stands for India herself, and like Einstein s, it stands for tolerance, for mutual
understanding among the peoples of the earth.

I had the privilege of knowing Rabindranath when Tagore was a name familiar
only in Bengal. As he is now he was then; as he was then he is now.

His heart was young at 50 5 at 70 his heart is young still. For beneath his ripe
wisdom lies, deep-seated, a rich wit, a laughing humour, genial, most human.

To strive for perfection is natural to exceptional men, but others are suspicious
of those who assume perfection. That mantle Rabindranath has never worn; his
sense of values, his humour, would not permit him to be measured for such a garment.
For he shares the qualities and the failings to which man is heir. To be more, or
less than a man, Rabindranath would never aim.

Hence his songs and stories stir our hearts as do great folk-songs, telling, as they
do, of the joys and sorrows of every man and of every woman. Through Rabindra¬
nath, India’s humblest villagers speak to the world. To be the flute of God and to
be the flute of men likewise, what nobler end can a poet achieve?

LONDON WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN

218

THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA—MIDSUMMER

LONDON

A wide and silent emptiness of space,

A void of breath, a taste of woes to come.

Surrounding Roman pride to mock it dumb,

Extends about in isolated waste.

It sprawls, a clumsy tortured mass of dust
Choking beneath a sun whose brazen glare
Has stilled all hopeful life and stripped it bare
Of hope, and superposed a crumbled crust.

For nothing lives in this unhealthy spot.

Shimmering waves of dancing death alone.

Beneath the fitful gusts that slowly moan,

Can move and be in an atmosphere so hot.

But when the twilight brings repose to pain
The gasping, tortured earth outstretched by heat.

Returns, relieved, to primal state. The beat
Of purple hazes sweeps across the plain.

As shades appear from out the ground and sky
And penetrate the land, illusion grows
And peoples all that plain with all its woes.

Its centuries of conflict long gone by.

And strong is felt that supernatural awe
That darkness brings to vast, unpeopled spots
Shrouded by shadows hiding that which rots.

Which waits for dawn, misunderstanding law.

ARNOLD RUBIN

219

H eartiest greetings to Tagore on his Seventieth Birthday I He has contri'
buted as much as any man living to the most important work of our time,
namely, the promotion of understanding between different races. Of what
he has done for India it is not for me to speak, but of what he has done for Europe
and America in the way of softening of prejudices and the removal of misconceptions
I can speak, and I know that on this account he is worthy of the highest honour.

HARTING, PETERSFIELD, BERTRAND RUSSELL

ENGLAND

II sftj II

5f sRft^srr i

^ II

DEPARTMENT OF SANSKRIT,

THE UNIVERSITY, HELSINGFORS, FINLAND

J. N. REUTER

It gives me great pleasure to greet Rabindranath Tagore on his seventieth birth¬
day with my admiration and my best wishes.

BOSTON, U.S.A

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

THE POET (1926)

After a Photograph by Suse Byk

FIRST LOVE

What treasure would I not have poured
At the white feet when love had power.

If beauty that I had adored
Were tender to me for an hour.

I pass these burning memories by
And run to find a child who lay
On the warm earth, made tender by
A love breathed up from the dark clay.

How may I win that love again?

All I could bring to earth it owns.

What sacrifice must be, what pain
To be at league with these grey stones!

DUBLIN A. E.

(GEORGE RUSSELL)

221

MEMORIES

F our meetings with the Poet Rabindranath Tagore are bright in my memory.
The first was at his house in Calcutta. I had come to India in the
Autumn of 1917 on the business of a University Commission. I was
anxious, before coming to any conclusions about the future government and growth
of the University of Calcutta, to learn as much as I could about the talents and
temperament of the students in Bengal. No one helped me more, few so much, as
the Poet in a talk which he allowed me to have with him early in 1918. In our
conversation I asked what place is taken by music, poetry, and painting in the home'
nurture and schoohtraining of a young Bengali. In order that my colleagues and
I might understand the beauty of Indian music, he arranged a recital in the historic
mansion of the Tagore family. He himself sang in the small choir. He had planned
a programme in two parts. The first part was confined to older music. The second
was made up of modern compositions, including some of his own. The intensity of
his feeling, his absorption in his art, made an ineffaceable impression on my mind.
Just as a lover of European painting can feel his eyes and thoughts being opened to
the rhythm and significant conventions of Eastern art under the gentle teaching of
one who knows the beauty of both 5 so, under the influence of the Poet and under the
spell of his skill, our ears and minds became sensitive to the cadence and harmonies
of Indian music.

The second meeting was at Santiniketan. We had been asked to visit the
Poet and to see his school. When we reached Bolpur, we felt the exhilaration of
the air. We saw the stately trees sacred with the associations of at least two
honoured lives. Exquisite in the glow of sunrise lay the contours of the country-
side. And then the Poet, tender and gracious, took his little class of bright-eyed
boys. So, a hundred years earlier, came to Yverdun those who were privileged to see
and hear Pestalozzi.

Twelve years had passed before the third meeting. The Poet was in Oxford.
C. F. Andrews brought a message that the Poet would show me his drawings. I
was thrilled by their colour and design. He told me how he had found this new
means of self-expression: how, almost absent-mindedly, he had made patterns with
his pen; how coloured inks had diversified the decorations: how, stage by stage,
his draughtsmanship had become more deliberate; and how in Paris painters and
critics had hailed the beauty and freshness of his art.

A few days afterwards I met him for the fourth time. He was to lecture at
Manchester College. The great hall was thronged. On the dais the Poet sat like
a prophet. He gave his message, and those who heard him will never forget.

As I brood over what Rabindranath Tagore has been to India, how he loves

222

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

her, how he has spent himself in her service, I am haunted by another name, an
English name, and by the sense of a dim but deep resemblance between the Poet
and one whose tone of mind and temper have made him beloved by many of his
fellow-countrymen for nearly three hundred years. It is true indeed that no two
great men are alike. And how different in outward seeming are Oxfordshire in
the first part of the seventeenth century, and Bengal in the first part of the twentieth.
Yet, in spite of this, the English name recurs as I ponder over the life-work of
Rabindranath Tagore. And the name is Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland.

OXFORD MICHAEL E. SADLER

AN INTERNATIONIST’S RELIGION

O UR Friend Rabindranath Tagore is an International Personality. He belongs
to all nations and all countries. Therefore on the occasion of his Seventieth
Birthday I present an International Interpretation of Islam as a contribution to
the Commemoration Volume: —

“Worship One Supreme Being, there is none like unto Him. Love God and
His people. Honour and respect the Prophets, old and new, of all the religions.
Peace be on all and Blessings of Allah. All the people are children of God, without
any distinction of colour, race and country. Sympathise with all and be kind.
Always keep your Faith above the world. Do good to all and look for no returns.
Trust in Allah, the Creator, the Provider, the Forgiver, the Protector, the Constant
Companion and the Best Friend.”

QADIAN, PANJAB, INDIA MUFTI MOHAMMAD SADIQ

223

INDIA AND TAGORE

I N the beginning India was the source o£ human knowledge. Pythagoras was
saturated from that source.

The structure of philosophy was moulded from the soil of India and the
soul of India was blown therein. Greece dressed it with the equipage of wisdom.

The glittering star of wisdom rose from India and, before all, enlightened Iran
and, through the illuminated Persia the Greeks traced out its Indian foyer. As we
already know, before the time of Alexander, and afterwards, the Greeks got the
human wisdom of India from its translation made into Iranian language.

Yes, for many centuries the light^casting India was the teacher of humanity.
But even the Gods themselves do not always remain in the same condition.

Then the West raised itself in front of the East and Western knowledge professed
to be more efficient in saving humanity.

The West suckled the offspring of humanity, but could not make the child
rosy-cheeked and healthy.

The fruit of the Western civilization is fragrant and gaudy, but in the taste of
humanity it has no pleasing savour and some say that it ruins the health.

Eyes were anxiously looking in every direction, and the human soul was in
quest of its lost Beloved.

All of a sudden, from the East, yea from the everlasting East, rose the resplen'
dent sun greeting our eyes. India once more sent her divine Poet'herald out to the
World.

The five rivers of sugar and honey streamed from India to the extremities of the
Universe. A delightful breeze blew from the banks of the Ganges, charming our
souls. Songs of love found their way into the East and the West. The conflicting
hearts were reconciled, and the anxious eyes received the rays of happiness and
joy. Bitterness got transformed into sweetness. Humanity rediscovered its beloved
Poet in Rabindranath.

O Tagore! though you are just going on to the seventieth year of your age,
nevertheless, be sure your resplendent teachings and thoughts have infused such
vital strength that all bonds and barriers of the unknown and obscure future have
been broken, and we have been taken now seven-thousand-years ahead.

Behold, Master, I, on behalf of Persia and the Persians, who are your admirers,
salute thee! O the Sun of the Orient! Long live thy soul.

TEHRAN

RAHIMZADEH SAFAVI

POETRY AND SCIENCE

W HEN man came to this world in the distant pleistocene age, he must have
felt utterly helpless in a world of giant reptiles, and colossal mammals.
He had neither their strength, nor the fleetness of foot possessed by
certain other weaker animals. The first cycle of his existence must have been spent
in caves, and there he must have developed the two precious gifts of speech and
brain with which he was endowed.

He must have peeped out in herds for collecting food and water and must have
stolen an occasional glance at inscrutable Nature; the smiling Earth teeming with
fruit, flower, and game 5 the life-giving Sun in all his majesty; the Moon with her
soothing rays ; Rain, and Cloud, with occasional thunders ; and lastly, the blue firma¬
ment with its inlaid stars and their mysterious motions. And occasionally, he must have
noticed a forest-fire consuming whole landscapes. Some man of brain, a Prometheus,
must have learnt the art of making fire from these natural fires, and this gave man
such a preponderating power over beasts that he was no longer afraid of them, but
could come out of caves, live in the open, and hold his own against the beasts.

The development of other arts followed—the art of farming, hunting, cattle and
sheep raising, as well as of metal working. But these peaceful developments must
have been interfered with by the outburst of saVage passions on the part of
individuals or groups. The strong lazy man will always like to shirk work, and
try to deprive his fellowmen of the fruits of their labour. The nomad who has to
eke out a miserable existence out of steppes or deserts, is always ready to fall upon
the peaceful agriculturist and carry away his cattle and grain. Ancient history is
the story of conflict between nomads and settled agricultural communities— e.g., the
perpetual conflicts between Iran and Turan, between the Chinese and the Hiung-nu,
between Egypt and the desert-folk from Libya and Asia, between India and
Central Asia.

The services of the Man of Speech must have been very early needed in these
struggles. As orator, he incited them to fight for the defence of hearth and home ;
as musician, he sang the praise of the warriors, and stirred up the heart of young men
to a love of fight and adventure.

In an age when the art of writing was unknown, or ill-developed, the poet's
service to the community was far more valuable. The poet must say something in
pithy, soul-stirring strains, which the community would not allow to be forgotten.
He sings of virtue and valour, of love and beauty, of sacrifice and splendour, and
raises a picture which makes a lasting impression on the finer faculties of the youth¬
ful mind. He is the seer, because he sees the hidden secrets of Nature; in some
countries, the poet and the prophet are synonymous, because they deliver messages

225

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

of the future good world. He is the Logos, because through him the Cosmic Will
speaks to mankind.

Now man has gained considerable mastery over Nature, and Science has
proved that the old world picture on which some poets based their strains, is utterly
inadequate and misleading. More than two thousand years ago, Aristophanes poured
his scorn on Homer and Hesiod because they sang the praises of a group of gods of
questionable moral character dispensing justice from the top of a little hillock in
Thessaly. People now make light of Dante who thought in terms of a medieval
cosmos, of an earth which is the centre cf the Universe, with the Creator’s attention
specially focussed on certain gentlemen with a capitalistic frame of mind. In
India, too, there are Hindus who make light of Hindu deities. The Bolshevik,
a successor of the Zoroastrian, because Capital is his Ahriman, and Labour is
his Ahura Mazda, pours scorn on the whole group of medieval poets, since many of
them sang the virtues of the hated Bourgeoisie.

Is the poet’s profession then gone? Will he be extinct like the dodo in the
modern age of machines, or shall he be succeeded by cinema knights, and heroes of
the boxing ring? I think not.—We live in an age of Babel. It has been now more
necessary than ever to build a Tower to Heaven by co-operative efforts, but we do
not understand each other. The Politician, the Economist, the Capitalist and the
Military man are all talking in jarring tones, while the groan of oppressed and
exploited nationalities is still unrelieved. Nations and groups are still bent on
fighting like wild beasts over the spoils of the earth.

But the Man of Brains feels that the fight is unnecessary, for if this spacious
Earth be properly exploited with the aid of modern science, there will be enough
food and sustenance for every mortal soul, and even luxuries will be forthcoming.
But the Man of Science is crude in his expressions and cannot rouse people’s heart
to the same height of emotion as the Poet.

Some poets are unconscious of the beauties of the modern scientific world-
picture. Their cosmos is still Olympian, their moral code is scriptural, their econo¬
mics is bourgeoise. Of modern science, they are cognisant only of the worst side,
of poison gas, chemical warfare, and the soul-killing machine. They are not
aware of the beauties of the Einstein conception of the Cosmos, the blending of time
and space, a blending of the creeds of Chronos and of Zeus Pater ; they do net
realize that the scientist has turned away from the creed of inelastic codified religions
to the worship of the inner spirit of Nature. Unlike the ancients, he does not
worship the lifeless symbol, but the very Spirit. His place of worship is not the
sacrificial altar, but the laboratory or the observatory. Only Goethe, amongst the
great poets, turned for a long time to the pursuit of science, but in his time, the
natural and biological sciences were only in the beginning.

Our Rabindranath, in our beautiful mother-tongue, has always sung of the
True, the Good, and the Beautiful. In course of his long life (may it be longer

226

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

still), the surging events of the times have always found a ready response in his
poetical heart. Sometimes like Homer, he sings in irresistible strains of the prowess
of an old hero, then he passes into a deeper mood, and sings of piety and devotion
like an old Hebrew prophet. Sometimes like Aeschylus he repaints an old story in
more gorgeous colours of morality and virtue; and again, like Aristophanes, he
pours scorn on the still lingering old world superstitions with simply crushing
effect. Sometimes like the old master Kalidasa, he picks up words like a jeweller,
and pieces them together with the finest effect, then he relapses into the simple
unaffected art of the country poet. His career reads like a poetical Odyssey, and he
is the old, yet the ever young poet. In him the art of speech has reached its
perfection.

But we, scientific m.en, beg to bring one complaint against him. His great
powers have not yet been used in the exposition of science—of the synoptic world'
picture of tO'day, of the beauties of the world explored by the physical, the biological
and the anthropological sciences.

May we not hope that, like his illustrious predecessor Goethe, he will turn for
a while to modern science, and give expression in his inimitable poetry to the Hope
behind the invading despair and the Harmony behind the modern Babel of jarring
voices.

THE UNIVERSITY, MEGHNAD SAHA

ALLAHABAD

W HAT can I say which would be a suitable tribute to the Truth which the great
Poet has proclaimed in his songs to the East and the West? He has delivered
in these new times the ancient message of righteous living in sweet simplicity
—the message which is from time to time delivered by devotees and poets in this land
of Rishis.

SIMLA, INDIA JOGENDRA SINGH

227

GREETINGS FROM RAJPUTANA

H AIL! Rishi of Modern India: the Land of Chivalry, Rajputana, tenders its
greetings to you on your seventieth birthday. Hail! the embodiment and the
true representative of all that is high and noble in the Culture of India. You
embody not only the spiritual culture of Ancient India, but have given it a beautiful
expression, in language as inimitable, as sublime, as souLstirring as the spirit of that
culture, carrying a message of joy of life in nature. Your work illustrates not only
the depth of that culture but also its alLembracing universality, thus vindicating not
only the glory and greatness of Aryan Culture but its triumph over modern thought
and modern feeling which the world is slowly recognising and realising.

A great poet is a great seer. You, the greatest poet of Asia of modern times,
are also its greatest seer. You have the vision to find the joy of life in every thing
that lives and lives eternaUy, though it assumes new shapes and new forms, thus illus¬
trating the eternal nature of Truth and proving that Truth is Joy and Joy is Truth.

The highest representative of true Indian Culture, your exposition of it in the
various cultural centres of the West and the Far East has had favourable repercussions,
and has placed India, the source of that culture, in a new light, rehabilitating it in
the minds of leaders of thought in every country, giving it a high place in the
hierarchy of nations. Your genius has the quality of universality, and it is because
of this unique quality, which no one else in the East or the West is known at the
present time to possess in such a striking degree, that you are the first and so far the
only true interpreter of Eastern Thought and Culture to the West. Indian Culture
and Art have found their supreme expression in you, and because of this you are best
fitted not only truly and satisfactorily to interpret the East to the West but co-ordinate
the best in both in a new whole.

You are a great poet and a great philosopher, imbued with the true spirit of
philosophy. You are a novelist. As a teller of short stories you are unrivalled in
the world. The pathos in them stirs the soul deeply. You are a dramatist and an
essayist. As an educationist you belong to the highest order, as your vision sees
through the barriers which baffle even trained minds, and your imagination reaches
the furthest flights of human nature. Your realisation of the essential elements of
human nature transcends colour, dogma or nationality.

Your consummate art, apart from its literary expression, shows itself in your
drawings and paintings and your histrionic gifts and musical compositions. Your
superb mind shows its high qualities in whatever department of mental activity it
finds occasion to work. As a poet, a philosopher, a patriot and a philanthropist you
have achieved world-wide fame and brought honour to the country which has given
you birth, and through which, as your countrymen are proud to recognise, you are
serving Humanity.

HAR BILAS SARDA

AIMER, RAJPUTANA, INDIA

228

P erhaps our chief ground for gratitude to Rabindranath Tagore is that he has
bridged the gulf that divides East and West. He is not only a supreme
representative of the culture of his own people, but has entered into the very
heart of ours. That is an extraordinary achievement for which we owe him in
equal measure admiration and thanks.

MANCHESTER C. P. SCOTT

Master,

You know probably not much of my country—this northern land in which at
times we are subjected to unbroken light and again to unbroken darkness. Let this,
therefore, be to you only a warm hand-clasp, intended to convey to you the significant
fact that in spite of the greatest outward dissimilarities, our widely-separated birth¬
places are linked together by one deep and decisive similarity. In both of them
beats the same human heart; in both the inexplicable something, for which we know
of no other name than human-ness, beams from human eyes. This essence of
human-ness recognizes its own wherever found. I cannot help feeling deeply that
it unites us and our distant countries.

HELSINKI (HELSINGFORS), F. E. SILLANPAA

FINLAND

229

INTERCHANGE

‘Arise ye little glancing wings and sing your infant joy.

For everything that lives is holy/

‘Verily from the Everlasting Joy do all objects have their birth/

‘None could live or move if the energy of the albpervading joy did not fill the sky/
‘In what manner do we accept this world, which is a perfect gift of joy?’
‘Gladness is the one criterion of truth.*

Thus the One Voice speaks through many voices: through William Blake as
through the ancient Upanishads, and through the poet who in these latter days
reports and interprets their great message.

‘ 1 st Er in Werdenlust
Schaffender Freude nah.’

So East and West alike proclaim.

Among the gifts which Rabindranath Tagore has brought us, we may surely
count his power to recall those who even in our action-driven West have entered into
the secret places. Again and again, Blake comes to mind, as we read the early essays,
Sadhana, or the poems of love, human or divine. There is the same honour for the
‘luminous imagination,’—that creative force, in which, Blake says, all things exist:
the same large freedom in a love that casts off bonds. Above all, we find a like
profound insight into a Humanity that is divine.

‘Thou art a Man; God is no more:

Thine own humanity learn to adore.’

Might not this couplet of Blalce’s serve as motto to Tagore’s last noble book.
The Religion of Man? ‘The idea of the humanity of our God, or the divinity
of Man the Eternal, is the main subject of this book,’ says Rabindranath.

One could proceed far with such comparisons with Blake. But other associations
crowd the mind. In that compelling drama. The King of the Dark Chamber, is it
Tagore who reports the words of the unseen King, to his bride who may touch him
but not behold,—or is it St. John of the Cross? When at the close of the play the
old Initiate, the penitent bride, the conquered enemy, meet on the way seeking the
Unknown God, pursued and pursuer, have we not metaphor cognate to The Hound
of Heaven? Delighting in Tagore’s early love poems, we perceive for what good
reason he was called the Shelley of India. How natural that it should have been
Yeats who in 1912 introduced him to the European public! (Yeats by the way com¬
pares him to Thomas a Kempis). We can recede far into the thought of the West
and still find parallels. The Religion of Man reiterates earnest witness that Reality

2^0

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

means escape from separateness: so old Boethius, ‘Know thou then that unity and
goodness are the same.’ In Tagore’s exquisite praises of the divine revelation con¬
veyed by natural beauty, can be found almost a transcript of passages from St.
Bonaventura’s Itinemrium Mentis in Deum,

In the pure full stream of mysticism flowing from St. Francis may indeed perhaps
be recognized the closest analogue to Tagore. There are passages from Capuchin
sermons of the seventeenth century which sound like com.mentaries on the penetrating
ecstasies of GitanjaU. The movement inspired by the saint who sang the Lauds
of the Creatures is, at its most distinctive, as free as Tagore himself from the asceticism
which in West as in East has often betrayed men into ingratitude. Neither Tagore
nor the greater Franciscans ever confuse the complete surrender of greed and claim for
which they both stand, with denial of natural good ; alike they find in such surrender
pushed to the limit, the entrance into fullness of life and joy.

Yet if Tagore shares the perceptions of the Western soul on its highest levels,
one hastens to rejoice that he has nothing in common with its more cynical moods.
With what refreshing scorn he castigates the ‘chuckle of an exultant disillusionment’
that is ‘becoming contagious,’ while ‘the knights-errant of the cult of arson are
abroad, setting fire to our time-honoured altars of worship’! As he repudiates tlie
crass pseudo-realism of the pessimist, so he transcends the scientific materialism even
among us now obsolescent. With what spirit he maintains that not in detail of
process but in marvel of result we are to look for ultimate reality! The lad who
recoiled disgusted from a dissected windpipe, came to incorporate in his thought all
that Western science has taught concerning the advance of physical life. Yet he puts
the scientific concepts of the West at the service of the mystic wisdom of the East.
‘I could not bear the artizan to occupy the throne that was for the artist who concealed
the machinery and revealed the creation in its ineffable unity.’ Eloquently he
reminds us that ‘in the secret chamber within the heart’ ‘the fire of Nature’s v/ork-
shop is transformed into lamps of a festival, the noise of her factory is heard like music.
The iron chain of cause and effect sounds heavily outside in Nature, but in the human
heart its unalloyed delight seems to sound as it were like the golden strings of a harp.’

In such absorption of European culture by a temperament distinctively Eastern,
Tagore’s greatest originality may perhaps be found. Might it be surmised that by
a rhythm of compensation. Western mysticism at its best owes much to an Oriental
strain, while conversely the mysticism of the East gains new richness when it accepts
the gifts of Europe? This fusion of elements is characteristic of Tagore, as it is of a
great spirit from Japan, Kagav/a. The genius of these men has triumphed over
Separation. It has broken down the invisible barriers which divide race from race.
Tagore can bring home to us with balanced appreciation the gifts, with the perils,
for v/hich two civilizations stand: the ‘best ideal in the West, the great truth of
fight,’—a ‘holy spirit,’ which yet at its worst ‘breeds unappeasable greed for
material gain, and leads to unmeaning slavery to things’; and the Eastern ‘inner

231

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

concentration of mind’ where ‘the peace of the extinguished desire may become the
peace of death ; and the inner world in which we would dwell become a world of
incoherent dreams.’ If there is value in the stormy approach of East and West which
we are now experiencing, it may be because the clash of these contending ideals shall
become a marriage whence a more adequate ideal than either shall be born. Such
marriage is foreshadowed in the writings of Tagore.

The poet is especially useful to us because he separates himself from the ‘time-
honoured tradition’ of those negative Hindu schools whose aim is ‘to reach a condition
wherein mind becomes perfectly blank, losing all its activities.’ When he says that
this discipline ‘may be valuable as a great psychological experience, but all the same
it is not religion,’ we sigh with relief. Tagore has always disclaimed, too completely
it would seem, the title of philosopher ; but it is true that his teaching springs from
that living experience which underlies the plane of thought. The very claim of
life has turned him from the quest for vacancy; it has led to his asserting that
conscious union in love with ‘the Eternal Person manifested in all persons’ is our
central aspiration. As we share such aspiration, as we advance toward such union,
antagonisms of race and nation will vanish. The poet severed relations with active
politics in 1907. But in the deeper regions of psychical life, he is doing much to
draw civilizations together. All the nations, says he, are breaking their shells j and
he helps in the process. It is fitting that we bring tribute of gratitude to one who so
sets us inwardly free from the prison of false nationalism as from that of the personal
self; who in his own work illustrates the possibility of fecund marriage between East
and West; and who enables us to see with clearer vision, in the energy, often so
disconcerting, of this bewildering universe, ‘the Play of Love.’

WELLESLEY, MASS., U.S.A. VIDA D. SCUDDER

232

P URE Art is sincere and disinterested no less than the ‘Will to Good,’ but in
appraising either or in laying down the norm, it would be ‘pathological’ to
appeal to any emotion other than the emotion of contemplating the beautiful
or the good. No doubt, all emotions are proper plastic stuff for constructions in
aesthetics as well as ethics ; but as building material, experience in all its forms is
intrinsically valuable,—ideation, imagination, instinct, no less than emotion. But
none of these enter into the norm.

What does enter into the norm and test of Poetry is not emotional ‘exaltation,’
imaginative ‘transfiguration’ or disinterested ‘criticism,’ but in and through them all,
the creation of a Personality with an individual scheme of life, an individual outlook
on the universe.

Judged by the above criterion, Tagore’s poetic achievement is characteristically
complete. His early poems are an exercise in emotional ‘exaltation.’ To this he
soon added the art of imaginative ‘transfiguration’ (as in Urvasi), In his maturer
achievement, he developed the criticism of life without sacrificing either exaltation
or transfiguration. Finally in his consummate later art, he has summed up all these
elements and achieved the supreme mastery,—the creation of a Personality with an
individual scheme of life, an individual outlook on the Universe.

BOMBAY BRAJENDRANATH SEAL

233

RABINDRANATH AND THE UNIVERSITIES OF INDIA

R esponding to the kind invitation of the sponsors of the Golden Book of
Tagore to contribute to its pages, it strikes me that my own tribute of praise
to the poet on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of his birth may best
take the form of an exhortation to the Universities in India to show greater recogni¬
tion to his v/ritings. It is true that limitations of language will prevent most of the
Universities outside Bengal from making any effective and wide-spread approach
to his work in the original, but by his eminence as poet, Rabindranath has such a
strong claim on the nation and translations are beginning to play such an important
part in literary culture to-day, that his volumes should figure even in their renderings
in a foreign language on the syllabuses of our boards of studies, side by side with
the best classics of Western literature.

It was my privilege, years ago, as the head of the department of English Studies
at the Benares Hindu University, to make a beginning in the direction, by introduc¬
ing the works of Rabindranath into the courses of studies in English, the Gardener
appearing on the list for the highest examination in the University, some of his novels
and stories taking their places in the earlier courses. It is significant that even in the
national atmosphere of that centre of learning in the ancient city of Benares, there
were not wanting people who shook their wise heads in doubt and expressed their
misgivings about the experiment which had not yet been tried in any other University
in India. The University had, however, had no reason to regret the innovation,
and the example has since been followed more than once by other educational
authorities in the country, in the United Provinces as well as in the rest of India. If
it has not become more popular, one can only attribute it sometimes to the inferiority-
complex of our own people, or again, to the want of self-confidence in the judgment
of contemporary literature which has not yet passed into the well-worn dignity of
acknowledged classics. It is possible that narrow prejudices have also sometimes
contributed to this result.

While the highest achievement of English Literature must be always inseparably
associated with aspects of British life and civilisation, it is no ordinary handicap to the
young student in India that the English classics placed in his hands invariably deal
with a world with which he is not very familiar. This applies not merely to
differences of natural surroundings, but also to strange variations in social institutions,
folklore and tradition and general outlook on life and its problems. It is difficult
for him to go into ecstasies over the skylark and the daffodil; but he could under¬
stand the language of the “little kokil singing on the sirish bough" and he has
recollections of the lotus opening to the morning sun in the village tank. He has
no knowledge of heather blooming on the highlands of Scotland, but he has often

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

run along the smiling rice fields o£ his ov/n native land. He has not seen fairies
dancing on the village green at midnight, nor has the nightmare frightened him out
or his wits in his sleep, though he has perhaps fled away in breathless excitement
from the bhut sitting on the wayside tree, or recoiled with horror from the possibility
of an ascetic’s ‘wrath.’ It may be, he has heard his parents cursing their karma, but
he is certainly puzzled at the idea of being born with an initial equipment of
vicarious sin.

It is alright to argue that highest literature transcends all considerations of local
interest and is universal in its appeal, but there is the obstinate fact that, except in
the abstract regions of philosophical speculation, literary masterpieces are built, in
considerable measure, with the brick and mortar of our daily experience made out
of the world which is in our immediate neighbourhood. It would, therefore,
undoubtedly make English literature more real to the Indian student if it could deal,
at least in some instances, with the ideas and objects of his own atmosphere. There
is hardly a writer better suited to serve this purpose than Rabindranath Tagore, whose
background is Indian to the core, in spite of his constant withdrawal to fascinating
worlds of idealism and romance independent of climes and people, and his works
sum up some of the finest aspirations of the Indian life and civilisation of tO'day.

It should not be imagined for a moment from what has been said, that this plea
for the wider introduction of Rabindranath’s works into the curricula of our Univer'
sities is based only on the Indian interest of their material. As a professor of English,
always anxious to keep up the highest standards of literary appreciation in our
Universities, I should have hesitated to indulge in this exhortation, even on the
ceremonial occasion of the birthday anniversary, if I did not feel convinced that the
works furnished ample material for useful study and stimulating exposition in the
class'room. In the delicate artistic and emotional susceptibilities of his lyrical
poems, in the placid and mysterious depths of his plays, in the variety of human
experience in his novels and short stories and in the profundities of his philosophical
v'ritings, there is the widest scope for the student and professor of literature to
co-operate with happy results, I am not unaware of the fact that a cynic has re¬
marked that the surest way of making a literary masterpiece dull and uninspiring is
to prescribe it for a University examination ; but I think better of the teachers of this
generation. And with all its dangers, it should be pleasant for the poet himself to
feel that he is in such effective and intimate touch with the future citizens of the
nation. As for the students themselves, it must be no ordinary inspiration to know
that they are reading the works of a writer who is one of the noblest exponents of
their national life and civilisation and whose literary ac’nievements have brought great
prestige to India and the East.

CAWNPORE P. SESHADRf

235

I N 1928 I visited India and had the honour of being received as guest in Santiniketan.
On the return journey across the Pacific I wrote down the impressions of my
Indian visit for the Munich periodical Zeitwende, My contribution to the
Golden Book of Tagore is a translation of the last paragraph of this article, since
I believe that the hope expressed therein corresponds to the aspirations of our
celebrated friend:

“It is our heartfelt wish that India soon will see economic improvement and .a
fulfilment of its political hopes. This wish is due, not to ilbwill toward England,
but to a conviction that mankind will gain when our gifted Indian cousins, who in
early times so surpassed us, can once again take their merited place in the world
partnership of culture with the result that their speculative, transcendental outlook
may counteract the expediency and materialism of the Occident.”

THE UNIVERSITY, MUNICH ARNOLD SOMMERFELD

I had the pleasure of hearing Rabindranath Tagore over the radio. He was in
New York and I was in California, but it was as if he was in the room. After
having listened to him, I, a Socialist, wanted to write him a letter, pleading
with him to open his mind to one aspect of the modern problem. It seems to me that
the evils of modern times which he deplores—of materialism, ugliness, and greed—
are not caused by the use of machinery, but by the fact that the machinery is in
private hands and used for private profit, and for the exploitation of all members of
the community except those who happen to own the machinery. I expect a wholly
different kind of civilization when machinery is socially owned and used for the
social welfare. I believe that it will then no longer be the enemy of the soul of
man, and will no longer have to be challenged by poets and moralists. I plead
with a great poet and moralist of India to lend his precious gifts to the service of
the movement to socialize and thus to humanize industry.

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A. UPTON SINCLAIR

236

'V., Principi

A TRIBUTE

I T was a monsoon evening in Simla in 1910. Foamy vapour floated in the valleys

and shrouded the summits.

*******

Some one in the house that I was approaching was singing. The notes
were low and plaintive. The voice—quite evidently a woman’s—was mellow and
resonant.

Presently I recognized it. The singer was none other than Srimati Sarala
Devi Chaudhurani, a guest in the same house in which I was staying.

As I entered the room I saw Sarala Devi sitting at a harmonium, her jet-black
hair streaming over her shoulders. At my request she sang the song again. It v-'as
in the Bengali—a sister of my own mother^tongue, Panjabi. For long the two had
been parted, but they nevertheless retained much of their common heritage.

After she had finished she slowly repeated the words and explained to me the
meaning of those that I did not understand. It was an ode to Mother Ind, composed
by her uncle—Rabindranath Tagore. Freely translated it ran:

Who is it that constantly approaches and retires
With eyes overflowing with tears?

Who is looking toward us with vain hopes?

She is my Mother 1 She is my Mother!

In the dark house what sad-faced one has prepared the meals for us?

Whose is the food that no longer pleases our palates?

It is our Mother’s! Oh! It is our poor Mother’s!

Thus it was that I, who had just returned to India after many years of world-
wandering, caught the first gleam of the Poet’s golden soul shining through the
lattice-work of his words.

A few months later I was staying at Baroda.

A stream of callers was coming and going at all hours. Among them was a
Bengali of refined manners and cultivated taste, but lately returned from Oxford.
His Highness had met him while in England and had appointed him to the Baroda
Service.

I soon found that he was a devotee of Tagore. He knew many of Rabindra¬
nath’s poems by heart. The Poet’s works occupied a place of honour in the little
home that he had fitted up for himself.

As we sat in the cool of the evening on the roofless verandah on the first floor
of the Chimanbagh looking out upon a marble swimming bath rimmed with tall,

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

slender palms, over which hung a huge pipal (ficus religiosa) tree, I would get him
to read poem after poem to me. He needed no coaxing. Many were the hours we
spent in this fashion. I was never tired of listening to this invocation to the
Motherland;

Thou who dost charm the heart of all the world.

Thou land gleaming with the golden glory of the sun.

Thou mother of our fathers and mothers.

The soles of whose feet are washed by the waters of the blue sea.

Whose green skirts are fluttered by the breeze.

Whose forehead, the Himalayas, is kissed by the skies.

Who wearest the diamond diadem of the snows ;

It was in thy hermitages that the first hymns were sung.

Words of wisdom, religion, poetry, history, first

Were preached in thy forest temples.

Thou art blessed, the eternal dispenser of good.

Thou dost distribute food from land to land.

The Ganges and the Jumna are the milk of mercy flowing from thy breasts.

Ill

Tagore’s Art had from the very beginning cast a spell over me. My whole
being seemed to vibrate in unison with the tunes he piped. The music of his
measures enthralled me. So did his imagery. I marvelled at the economy of material
he used in weaving the fabric of his dreams—and at the simplicity of that material.

His verse led the mind—imperceptibly but inevitably—out of the maze of the
senses into the realm of the spirit. At least it did mine.

There was nothing parochial about his message. It was not for one people, but
for all peoples.

Even Rabindranath’s love for the Motherland was not selfish or exclusive. A
native of any country, reading his patriotic lays, could translate them in terms of his
own land and be thrilled with the sense of national pride with which they inspired
him.

He sang of the beauties with which the Creator had adorned our India—of
the cultural heritage that her sons and daughters had accumulated through centuries
untold. He lamented the depressed state into which she had fallen—bemoaned the
fact that she had become a weight upon mankind instead of continuing to be a con^
tributor to the common store of knowledge. Politics interested him only as a lever
to lift his people from the quicksands of despond on to the firm ground of parity with
other races, where alone they could live in amity with others, freely exchanging gifts
of the mind and the spirit.

It was a great pity, I felt, that all this artistry—all this spirituality—should be
lost upon the great vyide world—upon even India outside Bengal.

238

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Why was it, I wondered, that he with his universal message, was little known
except in the province of his birth. The only explanation that satisfied me was that
he employed a medium that was not understood beyond the bounds of Bengal.

Would he have done better had he adopted English as the vehicle of his
thoughts? He had been familiar with that language from his boyhood upwards.

I dismissed the idea almost as soon as it was formed in my mind. With effoi t
he may no doubt have been able to twine the tendrils of his fancy round a foreign
frame: but they clambered naturally over the home-made trellis.

Years later I learnt that somewhere in the late nineties of the last century
Professor (later Sir) Jagadis Chunder Bose—another gifted son of India—had tried
to introduce the Poet to the West. He had translated some of Tagore’s stories into
English. They fell into the hands of the Prince Kropotkin—then a refugee in
England—who admired them so much that he sent them to an American publisher.
Judging by what happened, that publisher must have lacked money-sense as well as
imagination: for he returned the manuscript on the plea that the author was totally
unknown to the reading public of the United States.

The day dawned finally when the whole world acclaimed Rabindranath Tagore.
The publication of an English rendering of his Gitanjali was followed by the award
of the Nobel prize for literature..

The lilt that characterized Tagore’s original composition was wanting in the
English version. Some of the wistfulness had fled from his fancy. As Ramananda
Chatterjee, the Editor of this book, who, in his unostentatious way, has done more
to make the Poet’s writings available in English than perhaps all others combined,
once wrote to me, “The flavour—the aroma—of the original is lost in the translation,
however carefully done.’’

Despite all disadvantages, Rabindranath’s genius shone. His similes were
quaint—his imagery potent. Yet he was no prodigal with words.

The English take delight in depicting themselves as a dull nation. So adept
are they at creating illusions that this fiction has supplanted the actual fact. This
is all the more amazing because no people in the world possess a richer, vaster store¬
house of imaginative literature than they. Tagore’s genius (as Englished) made a
deep impression upon the cultured classes in the British Isles.

I was living in London at the time, having gone thither from Baroda by way
of Bombay and Cairo, during the summer of 1911. Writers in the British Press,
with which I was connected, lionized him—as is their wont after some one else has
discovered the lion for them.

Tagore’s vogue spread from year to year. Edition after edition of the Gitanjali
was called for. The demand for other com.positions of the Poet led to the publication
of Sadhana and other works—poetical and prose.

239

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Judging by my knowledge of the Continent (imperfect and inadequate as it is)
the religious element of Tagore’s thought has been better appreciated there than
perhaps in the British Isles. Srimati Sarojini Naidu told me, in 1919, that during
her visit to Norway she had found complete sets of Tagore’s works in humble homes
in remote villages in the “Land of the Midnight Sun.’’

The United States of America especially responded to Tagore’s message.
America is supposed to be highly objective. But objectivity has produced a reaction
there. It has bred an intellectual, idealistic class, largely consisting of women,
longing for spirituality. I doubt if there is any place, outside Bengal, where the
Poet is more deeply venerated.

Tagore’s message of goodwill came, moreover, at the psychological moment.
The world was beginning to groan under the weight of armaments. The miseries
engendered by the war and the disillusionment that came in its wake, had sickened
Europe and America unto the very soul.

Politically'minded men were advocating certain ways to achieve permanent peace.
They would have the governments of the world federate in a society of nations—a
world league—and through that organization bring about, by stages, the reduction
of armaments. The ultimate aim was the outlawry of war.

The more daring among these thinkers postulated a “world state.’’ The idea
was not new, Auguste Comte for one, had visualized a “planetary government’’ fifty
years earlier.

But the world had not passed out of the stage of little-mindedness. The national
ideal rested, in most cases, upon a “superiority complex.’’ Each nation insisted upon
Deing on the top. The doctrine of uber alles —of “ruling the waves’’—was dominant.
Talk of a real super-state, therefore, frightened many nationalists.

Tagore blazed a new trail—the trail of cultural co-operation. It was broad,
smooth and safe. No one need be frightened of it.

He saw that no nation was or at least could afford to be—self-sufficing. As he
explained to me, on one occasion, subjectivity needed the corrective of objectivity—
especially we in India. But, on the other hand, the objective people of the Occident
would be entirely lost without the corrective of subjectivity.

VII

My first meeting with Tagore took place somewhere in 1919. The moment
was fraught with shame and humiliation for all Indians.

In the spring of 1918 some bureaucrats in the Panjab—the province of my
birth backed up by bayonets, had scented a revolt. Barbarism broke the chain

240

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

With which it had been tethered to the post of civilization. Bombs were thrown from
the air on unarmed civilians and actually fell in the compound of a school in Gujran-
wala. Fire was opened upon a large assemblage peacefully listening to a publicist
lecturing in an open space (the Jalianwala Bagh) in Amritsar, surrounded by high walls
which imprisoned the unfortunate sufferers and placed them completely at the mercy
of the guns trained upon them. Respectable citizens were made to crawl on their
stomachs through a narrow, dark alley in that city.

Edwin Samuel Montagu, then at the helm of the India Office, sought to visit
the culprits with exemplary punishment, but failed to influence his colleagues of His
Majesty’s Government to do so. He was assailed by the Imperialists for even the
weak action he had persuaded that Government to sanction.

The sensitive soul of the Poet felt deeply the humiliation that had been heaped
upon his—and my—people. In token of his shame he had stripped himself of the
Knighthood that the British Sovereign had conferred upon him some time earlier.

Shortly after this he came to London. I took the earliest opportunity to call
upon him at the apartment that he occupied near Kensington Gardens.

Hardly had I seated myself, when the door opened and the Poet entered the
room. A tall black Astrakhan cap was set on his grey, flowing, wavy locks. A
kindly, patriarchal expression irradiated his face. Beneath his long, strong nose a
moustache accentuated but did not hide his sensitive mouth. His beard was snow^
white but for a few stray black strands. He wore a loose Cashmere coat over a long
shirt that came down to his knees, white stockings and slippers heavily embroidered
with gold thread.

A fine figure of a man. Well groomed. It was easy to imagine that in his
youth he must have set the fashion for the aristocratic young Bengalis of his day.

He looked—and talked—like a Rishi —^benign and friendly. By the way con¬
versation flowed, he might have known me all my life. There was nothing to suggest
that he was meeting me for the first time. There was no awkwardness—^no stand-
offishness—no pose.

Before I knew it, we were discussing the horrors of the martial law regime in
the Panjab. At the memory of it gloom spread over his face like a soft grey veil of
tulle. His voice fell. A note of sorrow crept into it. It vibrated with emotion.

There was not a trace of anger. He did not utter a single word of wrath. H is
gaze seemed to be turned inwards. His mind was intent upon the degradation
that had befallen our people. He seemed particularly oppressed with the thought
that India should have fallen so low that men of another land, in her pay, should
have dared to heap such indignities upon her. No passionate protest could possibly
have been more stirring than his super-sensitive spirit crushed under his sense of
shame.

Deeply touched, I asked him if I might cable the purport of our talk to some
of the newspapers with which I was connected. He told me that, before leaving

241

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

the Motherland, he had given expression to his feelings: but he would not stand in
my way.

I pulled out a pencil and drafted a few lines on the back of an envelope that
I found in one of my pockets and read them to him.

Then the artist came to the front—^for the first time. I had interpreted him
correctly. His meaning was there. But not quite his language. He had me read
the draft to him again. As we went through it—sentence by sentence—clause by
clause—he would stop me and ask me to alter a word here—a phrase there.

I was glad that it happened that way. It gave me (or so at least I fancied) some
idea of the manner in which he must ensure that his writings, translated into English,
would convey the same spirit that he had infused into the original Bengali.

Tagore carries to the public platform the quiet dignity that distinguished him
in private. That impression rises uppermost in my mind among the recollections of
a meeting that I attended, before which he read a paper.

The subject—“The Forest Universities of India”—that he chose for his dis'
course was characteristic of him. It was a clear-cut exposition of the Gurukulas of
old—where lads drawn from palace and from mud-hut alike sat on terms of equality
near to Nature’s heart, at the feet of men who had dedicated themselves to the service
of the Goddess of Learning.

The Poet’s voice was thin (he had not been in good health for some time). The
hall in which he spoke was large. Every inch of it was crowded.

Surveying the audience from a seat near the rostrum I could see that many
persons could not hear what Rabindranath was saying. Yet there were no cries of:
“Speak up, please.” No noise. No shuffling about or nervous coughing. There
was something about the lecturer that held even those outside the orbit of his voice
spell-bound.

Yet he hardly looked up from the sheets on which his address was written. His
tones were level, seldom raised to emphasize a passage. There was no gesticulation.
Only some magnetic current, hidden from sight, was at work.

Tagore’s treatment of the subject interested me. He talked of things that
made our blood flow faster. His sense of restraint prevented him from assuming a
“holier-than-thou” attitude. Therein lay his charm as a speaker.

LAHORE

ST. NIHAL SINGH

I have read Tagore’s Religion of Man with deep interest. This great prose'poetn
on God and Man is a wonderful blend of Western Science and Eastern Spiri¬
tuality, and the result is a rare feast for those who care for the spiritual view of
the world. It is in every way a fine achievement—perhaps the best work Tagore
has yet written.

HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY, J. C. SMUTS

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

FROM THE SPANISH ACADEMY
Leyendo Pdjaros Perdidos.

“El vestido de los hechos aprieta demasiado a la verdad.

Cuanto mas holgada esta vestida de ficciones! ”

Que hermosa la amplia vestidura de la Poesial Que misteriosamente realza con
sus majestuosos pliegues la eterna excelsitud de la Verdad! .... Cuan admirable
la desnudez divinal Cuan radiante se transparenta en la apretada tunica de la
Histovia I

“Si de noche Iloras por el sol, no veras las estrellas,”

En tu noche triste contempla los lejanos mundos siderales; no llores por que te
falta el sol, vivificador del mundo tuyo. Y cuando vuelva ese sol, apagando para ti
las estrellas una a una, piensa que ellas siguen inflamando de luz mundos mas gigantes
que el tuyo.

ACADEMIA ESPANOLA, R. MENENDEZ PIDAL

MADRID

243

TAGORE'S DRAWINGS

T AGORE’S drawings constrain us to pause and ask ourselves anew, what is the
purpose of drawing, of painting, of art generally. Is it to be a pretty toy
to amuse and flatter us, or is it to convey the deepest feelings from
soul to soul?

The popular artist, like the popular preacher, is careful never to offend our
prejudices, or to call us to make any great mental or spiritual effort, while the true
poet or painter asks us to see what we have not yet seen.

The drawings of Rabindranath Tagore prove that the poet, though a master
of the use of words, feels that certain things can be better expressed, or perhaps only
expressed in the language of line, tone and colour.

These things are not outward facts such as those of anatomy and perspective,
and the rules that can be taught in Academies, which become too often a hindrance
to the freedom and vitality of the imagination. Tagore’s drawings are, as I see
them, the work of a powerful imagination seeing things in line and colour as the
best Oriental sees them, with that sense of rhythm and pattern that we find in
Persian or Indian textiles and craft work. The colour sense is indeed superb.

But there is much more than this; there is a deep feeling and apprehension of
the spiritual life and being, of men and animals, expressed in their features, their
movements, their outward forms, lines and colours.

Can one explain all this in words? Can one say this drawing means this, or
that one means such and such? Assuredly no, for if any one could say it, the poet
himself could do so, and if he could say it then why draw or colour? We look
and look silently, and immerse ourselves in these pictures, and thus here and there
if we are humble enough, deep answers unto deep.

BIRMINGHAM JOSEPH SOUTHALL

THE INBORN CRITERION

T he invitation to contribute to this volume reached me, in far away America,
when I had in my hands the new book which gives to the world a brilliant
expression of Tagore’s mind. I refer, of course, to his Hibbert Lectures, The
Religion of Man, in which, as might be expected, one finds the imaginative artistry
of a poet, the penetration of a philosophic mind, the ardour of a soul which has
"touched the infinite" and possesses an "inner source of divine wisdom.” In the
reading of this book, which so happily supplements the volumes from Tagore’s pen
already accessible to the English-speaking world, I have found an illumination which
has brought into clearer relief and more significant relationship such fragments of
knowledge as I have of ancient and modern India. But it has done more; it has
suggested that East and West, separated though they have been, are sundered only
(to borrow imagery used by Tagore in a quite different connection) as half of a poetic
couplet may be torn away from the other half. It is in "a state of suspense” while
the other line, with which it rhymes and which could give it fulness, is "smudged
by the mist away in some undecipherable distance.” How otherwise do I seem, as
I read one page, to be listening to Plato, who found in mathematics a vestibule to
knowledge of the Real World, and as I read the next to be listening to Bergson, who
builds a metaphysical system on biological data; at one moment to be looking over
the shoulder of Marcus Aurelius while he writes those words which demonstrate the
highest reach of "the unassisted virtue of man,” and at another to be standing in a
crowd of English villagers while George Fox describes the Inner Light and the peace
of communion with God?

Such parallels, and many others, are suggested to my mind, and yet the words
of Tagore are wholly consistent, as it seems to me, with his inheritance, his environ¬
ment, his achievements as an Indian poet and teacher. How can this be? The
explanation is one which is hard to express only because we all suffer from the defects
of our education, in which the imagination was not stimulated to visualize the people
of distant lands. True, we of the West were led as far eastward as Rome, Greece,
Judea, but this was to study not the living but the dead; the Greeks and Romans
were hidden behind menacing walls built of grammar books ; the Jews, even the great

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

prophets, were known only through early Christian documents and were therefore
obscured by prejudice. That great civilizations had existed in India before Athens
and Jerusalem were even rude rock fortresses, that during ages which were “dark” in
Europe men had journeyed overland from China to India to attend universities, that
in our own time India possesses anything more than bejewelled rajahs, clever elephants,
famished villagers, and Jungle Book animals, were not mentioned to us.

The truth Tagore so clearly expresses to-day is one that some Westerners have
proclaimed but which transcends all distinctions between East and West because it is
a truth .about man as man. Let me now select but one aspect of it for emphatic
mention. Tagore speaks of an “inner faculty” of our own, which helps us to find
our relationship with the supreme self of man ; elsewhere he calls this “an inner source
of divine wisdom,” or an “inborn criterion of the real.” This is, of course, closely
related to the keen sensitiveness which he tells us characterized his mind from infancy.
He is occasionally made intensely conscious of an all-pervading personality “answering
to the personality of man.” The experience of this inborn criterion is not unlike the
“intimate feeling a father has for his son,” in which he “touches an ultimate truth,”
the truth of their relationship. But it goes further, for in immediate realization it
grasps the “grand unity of relationship” in the universe. At such times he has
“touched the infinite.” Vision, not knowledge, intuition rather than logic, has
brought this experience. Such consciousness of God “contradicts the trivialities of our
daily life, and upsets the arrangements made for securing our personal exclusiveness
behind the walls of individual habits and superficial conventions. ... It invokes
unexpectedly in the midst of a self-centred life a supreme sacrifice.”

Further yet Tagore goes in characterizing this experience of what he variously
calls the universal in man, the supreme personality, or God. The consciousness of
God comes to us as a call and we dedicate our lives in response, consecrating ourselves
to the service of mankind, of truth, of beauty. In other words, in this experience
not only is man reaching out to God, but God is meeting man. “Somewhere in the
arrangement of this world there seems to be a great concern for giving us delight.”
Over and above all that we can learn of matter and its arrangement, or of the forces
into which science has resolved matter, “there is a message conveyed through the
magic touch of personality.”

We are reminded of the “divine sign” to which Socrates listened and which he
obeyed at the cost of his life ; of the voice Jesus heard as he came up out of the water
of the Jordan after he had indicated his association with John by undergoing baptism ;
of the voices which directed and guided Joan of Arc; of the visions which moved
John Bunyan now to fear and now to hope; of the aflSrmative mysticism of George
Fox and many other Quakers, who saw “an infinite ocean of light and love, which
flowed over the ocean of darkness” and in that vision saw “the infinite love of God.”

To-day, in our Western world, there are many who are seekers for the experience
around which the whole of Tagore’s interpretation of life is centered. The Religious

246

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Society of Friends continues to bear its testimony to the principle that all religious
practices, statements of belief, cherished customs, and methods of organization depend
for their validity and vitality upon the personal experience of the individual who finds
God to be a guiding, enriching, and constraining force in life. Many others are aware
that life has not yet brought them its greatest joys because their lives are fragmentary,
incomplete, detached in self-centered satisfactions. They have heard that there is a
Truth which meets man more than half-way in his search but so far the only truth
they know is one which seems almost reluctant to be discovered. They have heard
that there is an illumination of life, not merely of the next step but of the distant goal,
or at least of a path which “shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” They
have been told that there is Power, and that this is not a power they can put to use
for their own profit but a power that will use them, even in their weakness. They
have seen a few souls consecrated to the loving life and they have discovered that
Love is not simply the nebulous ideal of a few affable souls v/ho are blinded to life’s
conflicts. And they would like to experience such truth, such illumination, such
power, such love. They would like to discover for themselves that God is really so
active in meeting man that those who ally themselves with the universal welfare of
man, in a great act of faith overcoming the obstacles and barriers of ancient prejudice,
transcend the limits of mortality and live in the infinite.

To help some of these seekers to find the truth which can bring them liberation
of spirit will seem a more holy cause, perhaps a less difficult task, to those of us in the
West who have been privileged to come under the influence of Rabindranath Tagore.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, U.S.A. HAROLD E. B. SPEIGHT

247

“A TRUE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD”

W HEN I was last in India—some four years ago—I was talking about Tagore
to one of his own Bengali countrymen and he said to me, “You English can
never know what a. great and wonderful poet he is in his own language. You
read him when he writes in your language, and you read translations of his poems,
but that cannot tell you what he is to us.” Then he broke into a chant and sang me
a poem, music and words both by the poet—and “how,” he said, “can you translate
that?”

Of course a fatal handicap for me, but on the other hand I was able to assure
my Bengali friend that the Poet wrote beautifully for us in our language, and that by
his writing he had done more than any man living to bridge the gap which
is supposed to divide the mind of the East from the mind of the West. Tagore is
always an Indian patriot and he has rightly resented what is wounding to the pride
or self-respect of his countrymen, but his thoughts travel beyond patriotism to the
unity of the spirit in which alone there can be peace and reconciliation for nations or
individuals. In this he had been a true citizen of the world, teaching not an Eastern
or an Indian doctrine, but the one human truth of which mankind everywhere stands
in urgent need to-day.

As an Englishman I like to remember that he is within our fold; and if I were
thinking of a test of British-Indian policy to-day, I know of none better than that
the solution, whatever it may be, should be one which would enable Rabindranath
Tagore and men like him to feel that they are living a free and self-respecting life in
their own home-land.

The visit I paid to Santiniketan in 1926 left me with an ineffaceable memory
of a personality at once gracious and fervent, imaginative and practical. Many men
have dreamed dreams, but few have so steadily applied themselves to showing by
example and practice what it is possible to do in their own time and generation.
Tagore commands our respect and admiration not only by his writings but by a
life of disinterested and self-sacrificing work for his ideals.

I can only echo the thoughts of thousands of admirers in wishing that he may
have many years of happy life and influence before him and that he may find time
to visit us again. For we too take a pride in him and have need of him.

CHANTREY PLACE, MARDEN, J. A. SPENDER

KENT, ENGLAND

248

WHY NEED WE EVER GROW OLD?

O LD age is not a matter of years. Counting by years, some of the oldest men in
the world have not reached what is called middle life. They are old because
they are old in soul. The soul is the true measure.

As soon as the freshness and interest is gone out of one’s life, he is old.

As soon as one wants the years or the days to hurry by, or as he begins to think
and talk about ’killing time,’ he is getting old.

As soon as a man makes up his mind that the deepest human motive is selfishness,
or that every man has his price, he is old; his heart is withered.

As soon as a man begins to suspect everybody’s sincerity, he is old; his soul is
wrinkled, whatever may be the appearance of his cheek. I know of nothing more
dreadful than such premature and unnatural old age as comes from living selfishly and
on the surface of life, until all that is noblest and deepest has faded away and has
come to seem an unreality.

The man who lacks faith, whether faith in truth, or in justice, or in his felloW'
man, or in himself, or in God, is aging in heart; weakness and decrepitude are creeping
into his soul.

There are still other marks of real old age—old age of the heart and mind. As
soon as the tender green of the grass or the gold of the dandelion or the witchery of
the falling snowflake ceases to be a joy to one, he is aging.

He who habitually looks backward, instead of forward, is old ; no matter if he has
seen only twenty years of time.

He who is interested in nothing new, is old.

He who sees Eden in the past, and who thinks the former times were better than
these, is old.

He who distrusts the young, and thinks the great men are all dying off, with
none to take their place, is old.

He who is timid and afraid to undertake new enterprises, is old.

The pessimist is old. The sceptic and the cynic are old. The habitual fault'
finder and complainer is old.

The man or woman or child who looks habitually on the dark side of things, and
always thinks it is going to rain or snow or storm, is old.

The person, no matter how young he may be in years, who has made up his mind
that he is unlucky, and that ‘when his bread and butter falls on the floor it always
falls butter side down,' is already old.

He who does not care for children is old. He to whom the laughter of children
is not music, is old. If a man has children and does not play with them and enjoy the
play, he is old, and may well ask himself, ‘Am I really their father? Am I not their
grand-father?’

249

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

He who does not enjoy humour, and whose face seldom smiles, is old.

He who never has time to stop and hear a bird sing, or to admire a sweet flower.

He to whom a rupee is of more value than an uplifting thought, is very old and

very poor. , , • , i r

Thus we see that old age of the mind and heart—the only kind that any of us

need much to dread—has little to do with years. It is well nigh as likely to come at
forty or thirty or twenty, as at seventy or eighty. In comparison with this kind o
old age how little is to be feared the aging of the body I For in the oldest body may

dwell the youngest spirit. , ,, r

Another serious mistake often made regarding old age—the old age ot years
I mean—is to think of it as necessarily an idle or inactive or unproductive period in
life. The truth is, some of the very best work of the world has been done and is
being done to-day by persons far on in years. Take away from history the great
achievements of men above sixty, or seventy, or eighty, and the world would suffer
an irreparable loss. Writes Longfellow, in his Mcrituri Sdutamus, a poem composed
in his old age;

‘Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers
When each had numbered more than four score years.

And Theophrastus at four score and ten.

Had but begun his Characters of Men ;

Goethe, at Weimar, toiling to the last.

Completed Faust when eighty years were passed.’

This is scarcely a beginning of the long and splendid list of achievements of men
far on in life.

The artistic and literary genius of IVfichel-'Angelo was little if at all duntned at
the age of eighty-three, as is shown by the exquisite sonnets, the fine architectural
drawings and the noble models for sculpture produced by him at that advanced age.

Linnaeus was still a devoted botanist at seventy-seven, and exclaimed, I am
happier in my work than the King of Persia!*

Humboldt kept young to ninety in scientific studies and publishing the results

of his scientific investigations.

Gladstone was holding the office of Prime Minister of Great Britain at eighty-
three, and fighting one of the most strenuous political battles of his life, that over Irish
Home Rule; and at eighty-seven he was addressing great meetings all up and down
England to arouse public sentiment in favour of the suffering Armenians.

Sir Moses Montefiore, the distinguished Jewish philanthropist, carried on his
works of beneficence almost to the time of his death at the great age of one hundred

250

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

and one, and made the last of his seven notable journeys to the Orient in the interest
of the Jewish people when he was nearly ninety.

James Martineau continued his literary productivity until beyond ninety, and
gave to the world his three greatest books after he was eighty.

Victor Hugo continued to write on with wonderful freshness and power almost
to the time of his death at eighty-three, and declared at the last, i have not yet given
expression to a hundredth part of what is in me.’

Tennyson gave to the world his exquisite ‘Crossing the Bar’ at eighty.

At eighty-five and beyond, Edward Everett Hale was Chaplain of the United
States Senate, he was at the same time a writer wielding a pen prolific and powerful
beyond almost any other in the nation, and a leader in nearly every great movement
for reform and for educational, social and religious progress in the country.

At far beyond eighty Count Tolstoy was writing with vigour, penetration and
power surpassed by no author of modern Europe.

General William Booth, the head of the Salvation Army, continued until beyond
eighty to tour about the world with as much spirit and to push forward the work of
the Army in all lands with as much energy as he had shown thirty years earlier.

Nor are achievements in advanced age confined to men. Women have their
full part.

Queen Victoria carried the heavy responsibilities of her high position until the
age of eighty-two.

Mary Somerville published her able and valuable work on Molecular and Micros¬
copical Science at the age of eighty-nine.

The Baroness Burdett-Coutts continued her active and far-reaching work in
charities and philanthropy until almost the time of her death at the age of ninety-three.

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe maintained until past ninety her keen interest in the
progress of the world and vigorous literary and philanthropic activity. She spent
a part of her ninety-first birthday reading Greek and a part pleading before a Boston
Scientific Commission for pure milk for babies. She said, ‘The deeper I drink of the
cup of life the sweeter it grows—the sugar at the bottom.’

Thus we see that age is a relative term. The point in life at which people begin
to regard themselves old is largely a matter of custom. If a foolish custom fixes the
time of the coming on of old age as at seventy or sixty or even fifty, the majority of
people are likely, simply because others do so, weakly and foolishly to consent, creep
into a corner, and regard their active years as over. Thus one-third of life, and what
should be the best third, is lost. We want a new psychology which will make men
and women everywhere think of old age as beginning at least twenty or thirty years
later than they have been imagining.

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y., u.s.A. JABEZ T. SUNDERLAND

251

Dear Tagore,

I think most often of you, not as the poet of Balaka or Chitrungada or Naivedya
or as the writer whose short stories have so opened up his country’s life to
us, but as the patriot whose passionate love for ‘Banga-Lakshmi’ has not
prevented him from being just to our ’Inga-Lakshmi’ (if Mother Sarasvati will
forgive such an outrage on Sanskrit rules of union). I never forget that your
generosity has been conspicuous under cruel provocation. A great writer, you have
been greater still in this magnanimity.

At Santiniketan you have made yourself a local habitation and green body
that your thoughts will live and work in, after your physical body has died. If
any foreigner desires to know how lovely is the heritage that India has received
from her Rishis and forest teachers, let him go to Santiniketan and be gathered into
the arms of that friendliness which knows no distinction of creed or nationality.
And if he wakes at dawn he will think he has died in sleep and passed to the Nandatt'
groves, with the daughters of the gods visible before him as they pick up the blooms
that darkness has dropped.

I saw three maidens gather in a heap

Such snowy harvest as the wood-nymphs reap,

Sephali fallen through the hours of sleep.

A double task to my enraptured sight!

They wove a garland to salute the Light,

And ‘filled the Basket of Farewell to Night’.

OXFORD EDWARD THOMPSON

252

BUST BY MR. JACOB EPSTEIN

By Courtesy of Birmingham City Corporation

P ROFESSOR Gilbert Murray said in a speech to the Indian Students’ Union this
year, ‘Dogma divides, but religious experience unites.’ I think I was never
more conscious o£ this than when I had the privilege some years ago of
meeting Rabindranath Tagore in his hotel in London, and he talked to me of the
aim and work of the Drama and of Religion. It was an hour I shall never forget
as long as I live, for he gave me a glimpse of the very things I had been striving to
find and understand as a Christian through the eyes of a great mind of another race.
I remember coming away feeling that extraordinary sense of unity that one does
occasionally realize—the deep underlying unity of the Great Faiths of the human
peoples. Deep down we are brothers, whatever our race and creed. I had felt this
before when reading the works of Dr. Tagore, but I never had so clear a vision of
it as on that early morning when he talked to me as to one of his pupils. I am
immensely grateful to him for what his plays and poems have shown me—also it is
because of his teaching that I have been privileged with the friendship of many
Indians. For this and for that vision of oneness I am always thankful for
Rabindranath Tagore.

, nKnnN SYBIL THORNDIKE

THE WOOD

Near my house is a wood full of wonders*

Dearer to my heart than many a dear friend.

Witn each season it puts on some new beauty.

In May between its old birches and oaks
Bluebells spread into lawns and wind in lanes.

.Then splendour after splendour of scarlet and purple
Great rhododendrons open their lordly flowers,

While among them, yellow or pink or ivory-white.
Feminine azaleas delicately unfold.

But soon these glories are all withered and fallen.
And once more it is a loveliness of green leaves
Embowering cool repose in its cool shades.

Slowly the summer passes ; over the hazels
Sweet honeysuckles ramble; the nuts ripen;
Birch-leaves change to amber, the ferns to gold.

But days shorten; stern winter is coming:

With wind and rain sweeping the oaks, it lays
Their branching grandeur bare against the sky.
Lovelier in its severity then seems
Their naked beauty than all their green pride.

Why then, with such bountiful companionship
Ever at hand to enchant or to console.

Do 1 not stay content, but week by week.

With a heart restless and thankless, must be still
Fleeing from a known happiness to towns
And people whose souls I know not, nor they’ mine?
Alas, being not a tree, but a mere man.

What is better I see and praise, what is worse I follow.

254

DORKING, ENGLAND

R. C. TREVELYAN

May the Poet’s message continue to bring peace and harmony to a troubled and
distracted world.

NANKING

HSO TSE-MOU

SUCCESSION

The little clock upon the table ticking

Tells of a world where measured moments pass.

Outside, the grass

Pursues its rhythm in undivided time.

The trees move strangely to their secret rime.
Sudden the dreamy cat has ceased his licking
And waits paw-poised upon the quiet air ;
Discerning there.

As the sharp instants fast

Fall from the dying present to the past.

The grave pulsations of that greater flood
Moving towards a bourne not understood
Wherefrom, as scudding waves from the seas rest.
Our life lifts up its crest.

LONDON

EVELYN UNDERHILL

255

DIVIDED CLAY

What are you, flesh, that you must have towers of thought.

Sky-snatching dreams, empires of perfect love?

You have five escapes from the house in which you are caught;

Five sure ways of delight and five are enough.

What troubles you, flesh, that you twist in your nightmare and shout
For things which, having, you hate, and lacking, but make you ill?

Is it for words or the ghost of a word that you wear yourself out.

Driving your grave that walks to the grave that lies still?

How shall your eyes take meaning or measure of Truth?

Will Faith ever feed. Virtue comfort or keep you warm?

What bewilders you, flesh, that you wait for these phantoms to soothe
You who are greater than spirit, you v/ho are action and form?

Then go your way, flesh, to your doom, for you cannot be guided.

Whose earliest breath is “I might,” and whose last is *‘I must.”

Ride on the tops of the world, self-deceived, self-divided.

And cry your impossible cry, you mouthful of dust,

NEW YORK LOUIS UNTERMEYER

256

THE BRASS POT

‘ I ’HERE is need of drinking-water. Fetch some, like a dear girl, from the far
A pond, Ushasi,'” said her mother.

To herself Ushasi’s mother sighed, “Ah! Daughter of my heart, to-morrow
where wilt thou be?”

Ushasi, with the docility of a Bengali daughter, lifted from its stand the great
brass water vessel, heavy even when empty. Holding it by the neck in the crook
of her arm, she rested its bulk on her thin hip, thrust out to bear the weight, as
in future she would carry her children in their infancy, astride on her side. Bare¬
headed and bare-footed she stepped along the narrow path that led to the pool
where the gathered rain water was pure and not yet choked with water-weeds,
threading her way past the standing crops of bright green paddy, the tall coral-
coloured stems of the jute plant, like a miniature forest, and the patches of feathery
lentil shoots. The waving greenery of the lentils was not more tender or graceful
than the light-moving figure of the girl who passed, without seeing them, the familiar
beauties of her father’s fields.

In the vast, stretching plain, lovely in all its monsoon plenitude of ripening
food under a sky, wide-horizoned as in mid-ocean, that glowed with the splendours
of sunset, Ushasi looked scarcely larger or more significant than the white paddy-
bitds that hopped and flew along the rim of the rice-fields. But behind the wistful
eyes and dreaming brow a whole world of human sadness revolved until her head
ached wearily and her heart felt big with pain.

Ushasi was a bride of three years’ standing, and to-morrow her girlhood in her
father’s house was to come to a final end, and she was to be handed on to her Swasw'
bari (father-in-law’s house) and to become a wife in reality.

It was not, however, any thought of wifehood that occupied her mind, nor
even of the husband, to her but one of a shadowy crowd of strangers among whom
she must henceforth live. What filled her thoughts was the natural childlike dread
of separating from all that was familiar and dear, and venturing alone into the
Unknown.

' Ushasi=Dawn.

257

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

“Oh! How can I leave Mother and Father and Granny, and Big Brother and
Khooki,"” she asked aloud of her own reflection in the clear water pool. “Who will
love my pigeons, and Toong'Toong the white calf, and how will the cow give her
milk if I am not there to talk to her at milking time?"

Far away, against the copper-coloured west, above the sea of green, a dark
smudge showed where the smoke of the great city of Calcutta drifted in the monsoon
breeze. The sight stirred fresh regrets. Ushasi had never been there. Her farthest
journeyings had been on foot to other village homesteads, or by shalti, the primitive
canoe in which the flood waters of the rainy season may be traversed to distant fairs
and markets. To her rustic imagination Calcutta was the scene of countless wonders,
chief among which was the “Magic-house," as the Museum was familiarly called,
a place of pilgrimage) and the subject of fabulous tales among these villagers who had
once beheld its mysteries.

“First Grand-father was to take me there, and now he is dead ; then Father,
when he had any money to spare, but my wedding expenses and dowry have used
up all the money 5 then Mama,^ and he has gone away to the city for work and never
comes ; so now every chance has gone. Swasur^bari is so far away, and no one there
will care much about me or ever think of taking me to the Magic-house. I shall
have to cover my head and veil my face and stay quiet. I shall be a bird in a cage,
nothing more!"

She stooped dov/n and dipped the brass pot into the pond, the ripples breaking
up her still reflection. The pot came up, heavy as lead like her troubled child’s
heart. The great beautiful eyes filled with tears as she thought:

“No, no, I shall never see the Magic-house, nor have any amusement any
more. Well do I know it.”

The tears overflowed and splashed unheeded into the wide mouth of the vessel
as she bent over it.

That evening Ushasi’s household drank the water she had fetched with their
evening meal, little knowing it had been salted with the tears of the girl who sat
among them so quietly waiting for to-morrow, her day of destiny.

CALCUTTA MARGARET M. URQUHART

2 Baby-Sister.

’ Mama —Maternal Uncle.

THE POET AND THE PROPHET

I T is true o£ the great men of all time that they have served their generation both
as poets and as prophets, and no higher honour can be paid to any writer than
a recognition that in his work he has combined these two activities. The un^
derlying motive in both poet and prophet is the same,—a sense of the unity of all
life ; but in the poet the sense of unity is more direct, whereas in the prophet it is
mediated through a sense of the Divine purposes working for the perfecting of
humanity, especially in respect of ethical need. It would be true to say of Dr.
Rabindranath that he united both these phases of spiritual activity, and, further that,
seeing it is not given to even the greatest of men to expend the energy of his soul
equally in all directions, his emphasis is rather on the aesthetic attitude to human life
than upon the prophetic.

He carries with him into his teaching the ancient Indian philosophy of "one-
pointedness,” but his stress is upon the positive rather than the negative aspects of
the doctrine of unity. If he admits the negative at all, it is in the direction of
a transformation of ordinary values rather than a denial of all values. No affirmation
of the spirituality of the universe must be allowed to deprive the universe of meaning.
If our hands are filled with the merchandise of the markets of the world, if in getting
and in spending we have laid waste our souls, the remedy is not in a withdrawal from
the ordinary life of humanity, but in a discovery of that region where divine and
human activity may meet, in a crossing of “the bridge leading to the immortal being.”
The world is a product of the divine activity, to which with reverence we must ascribe
the deepest truth, and of which we must find out the motive, and make that motive
our own, allying our human energy with the divine, realising that “the same stream
of life which runs through my veins night and day, runs through the world and dances
in rhythmic measure.” The doctrine of the unreality of the finite finds no favour
in Dr. Rabindranath’s eyes. “Who so steeped in untruth as to dare to call all this
untrue—this great world of men, this civilisation of expanding humanity, this eternal
effort of man? He who can think of this immensity of achievement as an immense
fraud, can he truly believe in God, who is the truth?”

So, as the artist and the poet, he goes forth to discover God in the infinite variety
of nature, realising with Bacon that “there is nothing in which nature so much
tnumpheth as in dissimilitude” and inspiring us with courage to “knock at every
open door” of understanding and appreciation. He contrasts Greek and Indian
civilisation, and thinks that the latter is more helpful to this movement of the soul.
The former was “nurtured within city walls,” whereas the latter found its natural
home in the forests and took its character from this environment of immediate
accessibility to nature and sensitiveness to all her moods and varying aspects. But

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

in the sweep of his poetic and reverential conception he brings man back from the
forests, and sets him in the midst of ordinary life, “where! the tiller is tilling the hard
ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.” Both in the variety of nature
and in the experiences of humanity he wishes to find the actual and significant
working of God.

Yet with all his interest in the particularity of nature our poet refuses to lose
sight of the central spiritual unity or to relapse into the determinism of mere
naturalism and materialism. This is a danger which is never far away from the
artistic appreciation of the details of nature or even from the scientific interpretation
of it. The poet may find himself overwhelmed by the world towards whose beauty
he is so reverential, unless he can recognise the dual aspect of nature. Dr. Rabindra^
nath shows in a paragraph of Sadhana how vividly he is conscious of this distinction.
"It indeed seems to be wonderful”, he says, “that nature has these two aspects at one
and the same time, and so antithetical—one being of thraldom and the other of
freedom. In the same form of sound, colour, and taste two contrary notes are heard,
one of necessity and the other of joy. Outwardly nature is busy and restless, inwardly
she is all silence and peace, she has toil on one side and leisure on the other. You
see her bondage only when you see her from without, but within her heart is a limit'
less beauty.” {Sadhana, 103). And he arrives at the position cf the seer of the
Upanishad, “From joy does spring all this creation, by joy is it maintained, towards
joy does it progress, and into joy does it enter.” Here is the ultimate motive of
creation, as the artist understands it and becomes a worshipper as he understands.
The world is the outcome of the divine joy, and we share this joy as we rise above
conceptions of mere law and utility, when, for example, we behold a flower not as a
stage on the way to fruit, but as a revelation of beauty and a mirror of the mind of
God. It is the intention of God that we should share this joy, for joy in its essence
involves duality. When we rejoice we wish others to share our joy, and if there are
no others present with us, we, as it were, tell our joy to a second self. Thus also and
in far fuller measure it i^ with God. The divine joy issues in the divine love.

Thus is the poet conscious of God, and the prophetic attitude must come as a
deepening of the poetic. In seeking for this deepening we are reminded of the
position of Lotze, who finds the motive of creation in “the expansive love which urges
Him to communicate his holiness to other beings.” The emphasis upon the ethical
motive may lead to a certain strenuousness and seriousness for which the dominance
of the motive of joy does not seem to leave quite sufficient room. The lighthearted'
ness of the poet does not harmonise completely with the prophet’s sense of the tragedy
of humanity, and the struggle with the evil of the world does not readily reach the
rest and peace that is at the heart of things. But the difference is temporary, and
not essential and eternal. Perhaps a reversal of the order of the divine motives might
reconcile the two points of view. If in our analysis of fundamental motives joy is
given the first place, this seems to explain the world of the optimist,—I do not mean

260

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

cf the merely superficial optimist, but even of the man who, conscious of sorrow and
of evil, is yet able to conceive of these as being due to partial views and to regard him-
self and others with similar experience as redeemable through greater enlightenment.
But if, instead of speaking of joy as issuing in love or finding dualistic expression
through love, we place love as the fundamental divine motive, and think of love as
(after experiencing and dealing with and triumphing over the sorrow and evil of the
world) resulting in joy, we seem to reach a deeper conception. The thought of joy
by itself as dominating the heart of God is apt to produce a too exclusively artistic
attitude towards God and to induce the idea of the divine impatience or even petu¬
lance towards those who are so foolish as not to sacrifice the lower to the higher values
or rise to the appreciation of the beauty in which the divine joy finds expression.
Rather are we forced by the tragedy of the world to crave for pity at the heart of
God, born of the realisation that man may use his freedom not merely frivolousl)'- or
foolishly but in deliberate antagonism to the divine purposes. He requires not
merely to be enlightened but to be redeemed, and because of the evil to which he has
surrendered his soul, he is so involved in the struggle towards the good that he is
hardly conscious of the peace and rest of attainment. Unity with the divine has so
degenerated into disunion that he requires for remedy the deeper conception of
of restored communion.

Yet, as has been said, there is no ultimate discrepancy. Despite the poignancy
of the ethical struggle, there is always, where that struggle is sincere, something of
fruition even in the midst of the struggle. For man there is no happiness higher
1 han the joy of the redeemed, and in the heart of God—in heaven—there is "joy over
one sinner that repenteth.”

SCOTTISH CHURCH COLLEGE,
CALCUTTA

W. S. URQUHART

J’adresse a Tillustre Poete I’hommage et les voeux tres fervents que mon ame
occidentale m’inspire pour sa personne et sa grande oeuvre.

Je garde de lui le plus venerable souvenir.

ACADEMIE FRANCAISE, PAUL VALERY

PARIS

TAGORE AND A BURNING PROBLEM

T he poet'Statesman, who has the rare merit o£ thinking every way, has
discovered and has been emphasising, what is not recognised clearly and
vividly by our thinkers and leaders, that political Swarajya alone cannot make
India free. An intense admirer of ancient India and of her unique institutions, it is
he who has discovered and revealed in unmistakable accents that certain things have
crept into our social organisation that have made India incapable of self-defence and
coping with modern civilisation. This phenomenon has a two-fold aspect. Firstly,
it relates to the innumerable castes, subcastes and outcasts that make up and divide
the Hindu society. Secondly, it refers to the relations between the Hindus and the
other Indians whose religion is not Hinduism. It refers especially to the Hindu-
Muslim relations. Of these two aspects of the social problem, the second is the
more tough and growing more and more dangerous to the country at large. The

262

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

poet has, naturally enough, suggested as the solution of the problem, constructive
work from within by ourselves and for ourselves. This suggestion is being
sincerely adopted by all the true political reformers of the country, and it may be
asserted that the problem under the first aspect is being fast solved while in the
meanwhile its existence is by no means a menace to the political advancement of
India. The solution recommended by the poet as regards the second aspect of the
problem is ‘the moral power of love and vision of spiritual unity.’ True, this is
the best solution and we, Hindus, must recognise our duty to start it and to set an
example. But every day events convince us that this source of solution needs a
supplemental source. This is not visible yet. I do prayerfully hope that our poet-
statesman would be spared for us for many a long year. Three score and ten is but
the commencement of old age, low as the average age is in India. We must ever
remember that several English judges asserted that they were at their best between
their sixty-fifth and eightieth years. A poet-statesman may well add ten more
years to this estimate. Well, India sadly wants the supplemental source of solution
of this unique problem. The tragedy at Chittagong, not to mention other places,
made him issue a very distressing but inspiring dirge. It is but natural that the
country should look forward for more light and safe, effective guidance from him in
view of getting rid of this strange phenomenon, so peculiar to our unhappy India.
The coming political constitution, however perfect, cannot solve this problem. The
necessity is imperious, therefore, for all the patriots and politicians of the country to
pool their ideas and ideals and discover a real and permanent source for the solution of
this ugly and dangerous problem. And I venture to think that efforts in this vital
direction are best made under the auspices of the divine poet. And we cannot think of
our pilgrimage towards our destiny in the family of free and great nations of the world
unless and until we shall have solved this problem.

It is a misfortune of my life that I do not have the proud privilege of a close
personal acquaintance with the poet. But I have ever found consolation in talks
with my friend, Mr. C. F. Andrews, an intense admirer and a devoted friend
of his ; and this, added to the desultory study of his works, reveals the noble and
lovable nature of the man, and it is easy for me, therefore, ever gratefully to admire
the immortal Indian and to wish him health and long life, if only for the sake of
our country at this crisis of her history, as well as of humanity at large. For he is
singing and practising the rare part of a glowing patriot and philanthropist at the
same time.

This verse from Bhagavad'gita is pre-eminently applicable to him if to any:
‘He from whom the world doth not shrink away, and who doth not shrink away
from the world, freed from the anxieties of joy, anger and fear, he is dear to Me.’

SALEM,

MADRAS PRESIDENCY, INDIA

263

C. VIJIARAGHAVACHARIAR

CHAMPIONS OF LOV^

T he Wheel of Life, as we find it pictured in a fragmentary fresco of Ajanta or
painted in glaring colors in the monasteries of Tibet, has in its centre three
animals, a dove (or cock), a snake and a hog, which symbolise the three consume
ing evils—^lust, hate and error. Such is the Buddhist view of mundane existence.
If we behold the hopeless state of confusion presented by this sadly struggling world
of men or look back on the still darker days of the great war, is there not much reason
to believe that, indeed, the Buddhist gloomy view is fully justified and that human
life is governed by those three animals?

We need only call to mind the spectacle of civilised nations striving to exter-
minate each other with every weapon which modern science placed in their hands.
And sadder still: we have seen their feelings of hatred being kindled by a campaign
of ruthless slander carried on as relentlessly as the internecine strife of the contending
hosts.

This, surely, is the most alarming element in this desperate state of affairs that
the sentiments of deep aversion between large communities of human beings still
subsist and are continued to be stirred up by the powers of evil, so that at any moment
the smouldering fire may burst out again into a conflagration as terrible and destructive
as the one we have witnessed.

It would be a comfort, were we allowed to suppose that this aversion is merely
artificial. But alas! this would be an illusion. The facts are against such an
assumption. That gulf, on the contrary, which separates not only nations and
races, but also religious and social groups belonging to one and the same nation and
race, is largely and perhaps fundamentally natural and due to natural causes. It is
found even among the most primitive tribes, which possess neither press nor
newspapers.

What then is the antidote against that deadly poison which threatens to consume
the whole world of the living? It is Universal Love. It is sympathy fostered by
knowledge and true culture. This is the great task of the leaders of mankind—
prophets and saints, poets and artists, statesmen and scholars—to promote that feeling
of mutual understanding and goodwill which is inspired by Universal Love, Love
is the heavenly champion whose mission it is to slay the beasts of evil.

Among those leaders of men we greet the Poet of India, whose songs have
comforted and rejoiced not only his own people but the peoples of the East and the
West, and whose noble mission it has been to unite the disunited through the power
of Divine Love.

THE UNIVERSITY, J. Ph. VOGEL

LEYDEN, HOLLAND

264

V.O.K.S. FIRST PIONEERS’ COMMUNE

Rabindranath Tagore
Dear Poet,

The First Pioneers’ Commune still remember the evening they spent with you,
and send you their warm greetings on your seventieth birthday.

We remember well your national song which you sang to us.

Since your departure life has carried us ahead and the country has taken giant
strides towards socialism.

Almost every day we see a new industrial plant or a factory cropping up to
carry out the Five-year Plan which, not very long ago, was ridiculed by our hostile
critics as a fantasy.

But the enthusiasm of the nation works miracles. Not adults alone are takirig
part in the building up but also four millions of children who have declared that
they are not only builders of the future but also of the present. Our communes are
fighting on all fronts of National Labour, shoulder to shoulder with other blocs.

We work at the metallurgical factory “Sickle and Hammer’’. This factory
belonged formerly to the French capitalistic group Goujon. There are yet amongst
us workers unenlightened enough who drink, get drunk and stay away from work.
We are trying to redeem them: We use our most powerful means—the Social
Contract. We promise to study well at school and we take their word not to idle
about any more. Numerous idlers have given their word not to fly from work any
more but to take an active part in the national reconstruction.

There is another sad legacy of the old order—Illiteracy. There are still millions
of illiterate people in the country and we have been enlisted to fight illiteracy.
We. in our school, teach fifty such people. Besides that, we are doing cultural
work in connexion with the “Red Corner’’ in the Library. We also help in intro¬
ducing technical education among the masses. Thus we are educating ourselves
politically and preparing for the great constructive work of the nation.

We wish you all happiness and hope to meet you again in our free socialistic
country.

Greetings from the First Pioneers’ Commune.

MOSCOW

CIRCLE

How may the universe forget?

Stars never set.

They wind about the sky above, below,

As little glittering shuttles come and go.

How may the circle fail?

We see the dreams exhale,

Like mist wreaths, upward, building into cloud
The castles that we thought so real, so proud;
Fading into another vaguer shape.

We think their souls escape.

Yet done is never done.

One after one

Our dreams rebuild the things we say are gone.

Space shapes Madonnas on
Out of the shapeless mist of vanished things:

The circle swings.

The tiny circle widening again
Till once more there are men.

NEW YORK

MARGARET WIDDEMER

?66

RABINDRANATH’S VISIT JO MUNICH

T he visit of the great Indian poet and philosopher to Munich has left an
indelible memory in the heart of all who had the good fortune to come
into contact with him at that time, and that out of two reasons. At a
time of utter confusion, when the German nation has not yet been able to overcome
the grave moral and spiritual injuries sustained by Germany during the war and when
perfected personalities are becoming more and more rare, it is really gratifying to
meet a man who can give perfect expression to the noble harmony of his own inner
self. Besides, we should not forget that Rabindranath Tagore came to Munich just
at a time when, from here, the first successful attempts had been made towards
forming happy and promising relations with the academic world of India. This
academic interrelation could not be better expressed symbolically than by the per-
formance of PosUOffice by the German students and of Chitra in the original
Bengali language by the Indian stipendiaries of the Deutsche Akademie. It was
really astonishing to see that the German audience, who could but guess at the
meaning of the words that were spoken on the stage, were so enraptured that the
performance of Chitra had to be repeated not only in Munich but also in other
towns of Germany.

Formerly we have honoured in Rabindranath Tagore the universal poet and
philosopher only, but his visit to Munich last year revealed to us quite a new and
charming side of his personality. The rhythm of his soul found new expression
in enchanting pictures which fill us with awe and wonder—an absolutely new
departure so late in life! Goethe’s immortal words ‘eternal urge and unceasing
exertion’ (ewig strebend sich bemiihcn) have been actually realized in this man and
it is a very significant accident that, soon after Rabindranath’s seventieth birth'day
anniversary, the world is going to celebrate the hundredth death anniversary of the
great German poet, who, though already dead three generations ago, is to-day more
alive than ever.

Unfortunately, it is not possible for us Germans to appear before the Master
and according to the graceful Indian custom place a garland of blooming blossoms
round his neck, as his countrymen did, when he alighted from the train in Munich.
But words which fulfil themselves in deeds are less transitory than the blossoms of
the spring. These are the respectful words and these the good wishes which I bring
forward before the Master in the name of his friends and admirers in Munich, and
I hope, as often as the eyes of him, for whom they were written, fall on them, they
may assume the glory and lustre of actual life.

MUNICH THEODOR VON WINTERSTEIN

267

TO RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Dear Poet,

Everything I have thought or written, since living in your country, has been
influenced by India, and especially by you. ‘The steps that I heard in my play-room
shall echo from star to star!’

For your kindness to me I can never be sufficiently grateful. It was when you
were very ill that you sat up all one night reading Bengal Lancer, and wrote a review
that gave the endorsement of your prevailing name to reminiscences which might
well have been almost stillborn. I shall never forget that, nor my hour of pride
when I saw that the foremost man of letters of our day had approved my writing.
It would have been so easy to find fault v/ith a stranger’s presentment of India: it was
generous of you to look on the lights rather than the shadows of my book.

But beyond your personal kindness, I see in you a guide and a Guru, Even if
I have never known you, I would revere you as an interpreter, not of India only, but
of the Universe.

Thank you for what you are, dear Poet, even more than for what you have done
for me. May I be privileged to see you again, and often ; and may you enjoy healtli
and happiness to give the fruits of your genius to the world, and continue the service
you render to Art, to India, and to Youth.

RYE, SUSSEX, F. YEATS BROWN

ENGLAND

268

Dear Tagore,

They wrote me sometime ago to ask me to contribute to your Golden Book.
1 forgot and then Rothenstein wrote to me, but his letter, delayed in the post, only
reached me two days ago. I have been travelling about, and shall be for some days
yet, and when I am settled enough to think, it may be too late. !, therefore, want to
tell you that I am still your most loyal student and admirer. Your poems, as you
know, came to me as a great excitement; and of recent years I have found wisdom
and beauty, or both, in your prose —The Home and the World, your short stories
and your Reminiscences.

Since we met I have married. I have now two children, a boy and a girl,
and feel more knitted into life; and life, when I think of it as separated from all
that is not itself, from all that is complicated and mechanical, takes to my imagina¬
tion an Asiatic form. That form I found first in your books and afterwards in
certain Chinese poetry and Japanese prose writers. What an excitement it was
the first reading of your poems, which seemed to come out of the fields and the rivers
and have their changelessness!

Yours sincerely.

DUBLIN

W. B. YEATS

FOR RABINDRANATH TAGORE

SALZBURG

Zwischen Weinen, Lust und Lachen
Sind wir willenlos gestellt,

Traiimend meinen wir zu wachen,

Doch dcr Traum ist Wahn, nicht Welt.

Bless ein Spiel der stummen Dinge
Miihen wir uns, Sinn zu sein,

Aber Schlaf mit schwarzem Ringe
Schliesst den Traum des Traiimens ein.

Zwischen ihm, dem wir entstammen
Und dem Schlaf, der uns erharrt
Zuckt in bilderhaften Flammen
Unser Schein von Gegenwart.

STEFAN ZWEIG

[translation]

Between weeping, joy, and laughter
We are set, having no wills of our own ;
Dreaming, we think we are ay/ake.

Forsooth, the dream is an illusion, not the world.

A mere sport of dumb things.

We take pains to rise to thought;

But sleep with a black ring
Locks up the dream of dreaming.

Between Him from whom we are descended
And sleep that awaits us.

Oscillates in image-building flames
Our appearance of the Present.

270

OFFERINGS

271

RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S MUSIC

W HEN the request to write a contribution to the Poet’s Golden Book reached me,
it struck me that in no way^ could I better, pay my homage than by writing about
music, the poet’s music, so little known in Europe, about the character of which
such strange errors persist even in India. Still, the idea of a poet composing his own
music is by no means unknown in India, neither in classical, nor in folk music. As far as
the former is concerned, we find mentioned in the old Sanskrit texts the artist called Vag-
geya-karaka—the maker of words and melody. So in the ‘Sangita-darpana,’ III, ^1. 57:

vag-varpa-samudayas tu matur ity ucyate budhaih,
geyam dhatu, dvayoh karta prokto vag-geya-karakak:

‘The complete group of rhetorical figures such as words and varna is called matu by
the wise, that which is sung dhatu. The composer of both is called vag-geya-karaka.’
The good Vag-geya-karaka tops the list of artists.

When we turn towards the field of popular music, we find this phenomenon in a still
stronger degree. The great mystics of the middle ages, pre-eminently men from the
people singing for the people, in their outbursts of ecstasy created both words and music ;
and even in our days we find the Batds of Bengal—just limiting ourselves to Tagore's
native province—who, in their best utterings, create words and music together.

Now, why is it that in the case of Rabindranath Tagore so comparatively few amongst
those of his educated fellow-countrymen who are trained in classical music fully appreciate
this music and do justice to it, whereas it appears from different reliable sources that the
common people often take to his songs, words and melody ?

I think we may safely attribute this fact to the vogue for what is now called ‘classical’
music, viz., ustddi music, the art developed and produced mostly by Muhammadan
singers, presenting a combination of what was living from olden times in India, with
the kindred music imported by the Muhammadan conquerors, mainly from Persia.

This art undoubtedly came to a brilliant and wonderful development at the time of
the great Mughal emperors, but it did not escape degeneration when that glorious perkxl
came to an end. One of the signs of this degeneration undoubtedly was the loss of sense
of proportion and construction, betrayed by a well-nigh unparalleled growth of detail.
The sense of the words became often smothered under flourish, whereas in the classical
Sanskrit treatises the giving of a clear sense is still mentioned as of great virtue. The
music-loving connoisseurs and artists, of the last two or three generations at least, have
become so accustomed to this form of art-music that it is now almost impossible for them
to appreciate a kind of music in which the word and the melody have equal importance,
and where consequently the unbridled passion for flourish is mercilessly checked.

Protest was raised in large circles. This music was decried as un-Indian,
Europeanised, etc. Still the music of Rabindranath Tagore is neither Europeanised nor
un-Indian. On the contrary, it is solidly rooted in its own soil, that of his native province.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Bengal. The strong personality of the poet, however, has stamped it with an unmistak¬
able character of its own. It is undeniable that at a certain time there really has been
European influence. Rabindranath Tagore himself amply describes it in his ‘Reminis¬
cences,’ and fully acknowledges the part English music played in the creation of his first
stage-work, Vdlmtki Pratibhd.

The fact that the house of the Tagores never closed its doors against foreign
influence is sufficiently known, and it is certain that Maharshi Devendranath Tagore
encouraged the study of Western music as well as that of the classical Indian styles for the
restoration of which his near relative. Raja Sourindra Mohan Tagore, so valiantly fought.

Consequently the young Rabindranath Tagore must have heard both in his ancestral
home, but even at that time the charm of Western music was not strong upon him.
Whereas he describes the sense of disappointment he experienced when learning some
English (Irish) melodies, the rapture enjoyed at the trips on the river with his brother
Jyotirindranath,—when they varied their rdgas and rdgints along with the course of the
day—is still strong when he relates this episode so many years after. As a matter of fact
harmony, so essential to our present Western music, still baffles the poet and leads him
astray. Consequently the influence of Western music is of passing importance in the
totality of Tagore’s musical creations.

Not Western music, nor even classical Indian music, was destined to bring his genius
to its full development. It was the folk-music of Bengal that stirred the depths of his
nature with such wonderful results. Only the fact that the educated classes of his
country who live in towns have lost contact with the real folk-life accounts for the discredit
of his music in the appreciation of so many w'ho love and admire his poems.

As a young man even Tagore himself did not realise the importance of the culture of
the common people. It was not until his wise father had entrusted him with the manage¬
ment of the East Bengal estates that Rabindranath became fully aware of the treasures
of his own country.

East Bengal and later West Bengal: Bdul songs— Klrtan music. Hear how in the
Bdul songs, and in the closely related boat-men songs, the highest mystical truths are
expressed in words so simple as to be clear to every one, sung to melodies as simple in
structure as the words, and thus enhancing the spiritual appeal. Hear how the Klrtan
music sings the glories of the love of Krishna and Radha with a glow of devotion ; lyrical
words, not smothered by a deluge of flourish, however intricate melody and rhythm may be.

Neither Bdul nor Klrtan singers employ the classical rdgas. Both use notes and
intervals as suited, not as prescribed. Bduls do not mention rdgas even. Klrtan music
has kept names of classical rdgas, once used perhaps, but long since converted into new
structures.

Nothing could be more congenial to Rabindranath Tagore’s nature than this attitude
towards the rigidity of classical rules. He is ever the breaker of bonds and fettering
traditions, but never the destroyer of their true basis. Knowing the old rdgas perfectly
well, he too had the right to use and change them as his own inspiration told him to do.

274

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Had not the old mystics created their own ragas, the Bauls their own tunes, and had not
Ktrtan adapted the old forms to its new needs?

His perfect balance of words and melody, and his simplicity and conciseness of cons¬
truction, are contributions to the whole of Indian music that cannot be underrated easily.

It is characteristic of the genius of Rabindranath Tagore that he has, as if by
instinct, found the Dhrupad the only form in ancient Indian music that could serve as a
basis for his creations. From long before the Jiluhammadan conquest even up to our
present days, this form of Indian music, regarded as most sacred, continued to exist, in
which the words had and have their importance. Still the holy character implied the use
of very difficult time and very dignified ragas. The poet has succeeded in keeping the
essential features of construction, but nevertheless has made the form supple and clear, fit
for the direct appeal even to the heart of the simple peasant.

This happy combination o£ the Dhrupad and folk-music is the strongest feature of the
musical oeuvre of Tagore.

It had been the tendency in Europe to see the figure of Tagore as a more or less
isolated phenomenon, but his real greatness can only be realised when one sees him against
the background of the culture of his own country.

There are three things by which an Indian musician can realise his intention: words,
melody and rhythm. By the repetition of the essential w'ords at the end of a strophe an
often exquisite effect is reached. Certain intervals enhance the spiritual meaning of the
wc>rds. One could give dozens of examples of that fact, but two will be sufficient here :

There is the amazed question expressed by a leap of a major third from the ‘sa’ on
the last syllable of sundarcu in the song that begins with Ekadd ki jdni kon Punyera phale,
o go sundara fOnce, by what fruit of merit, O thou beautiful ?)

Then there is the exquisite change from the regularly used minor third to the major
in one song from the drama Nalir Pitjd (The Dancing-girl’s Worship). The words are
Pathe jete dekechile more (Going on the path thou hadst called me), with the sudden
brightening of the major third on the first syllable of more, a gleam of light, drownied
immediately again by the returning of the minor interval, in keeping with the general
sentiment of the poem.

This phenomenon is by no means unknown in Indian music, but Rabindranath
Tagore has used it, restoring its proper significance.

Lastly, there is the unsurpassed use of slight rhythmical variations, even in the
repetition of the same melodical phrases, giving an entirely different character to the music.

In the same song 0 go sundara we find in the first stanza ghum-hhdhgd cokke
dhardra legeche hhdlo (to the sleep-broken eyes of the earth appeared beautiful, vt:.,
the first tender light of dawn) where the leap of a fourth from the 'pa’ to the upper 'sa’, in
quavers, still suggests something of the heaviness of the sleep.

When towards the end of the song the words piche piche iava uddye caluk tube
(ever after thee let me be swept, viz., by the evening breeze) occur, this same melodical
phrase is used, but the urge is made felt by this leap of a fourth in semi-quavers.

275

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Instances of this kind are to be found over and over again. So when in fear cokher
cait'ar hdwdy doldy man the unequal rhythm two plus four is suddenly left for the rocking
three plus three at doldy man (rocks thy heart), only to return immediately after these
words.

This is by no means a conscious process, but the result of an intuitive realisation of
the deepest meaning of the words. It is for that reason that the songs of Tagore are
complete in themselves. Nobody but the poet himself can realise the full meaning of
both music and words, and create the necessary details. Changes in melody, rhythm or
words can therefore be but deteriorations. The usual Indian freedom for changes within
the song becomes absurd in this case. It is as if one had a painting by some great artist
and one started changing its design and colours!

The only attitude for approaching the music of Tagore is the one natural towards
any creation of a great artist, viz., open-minded and with the desire to realise the thing
as it is. Nobody will be disappointed at the riches that are revealed to him by this
process, even though some songs may appeal to one more than others. It is certain that
one will experience the truth of what Tagore himself says concerning the melody of
songs, speaking about how he composed a very well known poem of his I know thee,
0 Woman of strange lands (‘Reminiscences,’ page 206):

‘Had not the tune been there I know not what shape the rest of the poem might
have taken, but the magic of the melody revealed to me the stranger in all her loveliness.
It is she, said my soul, who comes and goes, a messenger in this world from the shore of
the ocean of mystery. It is she of whom we now and again catch glimpses in the dewy
autumn mornings, in the scented nights of spring, in the inmost recesses of our heart—
and sometimes we strain skywards to hear her song. To the door of this world-charming
stranger the melody, as I say, wafted me, and so to her the rest of the words are addressed.

‘Tong after this, in a street in Bolpur, a mendicant Bdtil was singing as he walked
along :

How does the unknown bird flit in and out the cage ?

O, could I but catch it. I'd ring its feet with my love.

I found this Bdul to be saying the very same thing. The unknown bird sometimes
surrenders itself within the bars of the cage to whisper tidings of the boundless unknown
beyond. The heart would fain hold it near to itself, but cannot.

‘What but the melody of song can tell us of the goings and comings of the unknown
bird?’

S.tNTINIKBTAN,

INDIA

A. A. BAKE

276

THE OMNISCIENT BEING IN INDIAN ART

Slntdr mdjhe, asim ! tumi
bdjdo dpan sur —
dmdr mdjhe tomdr prakdi
tdi eta madhur.

A n earnest longing to realise the Infinite in the finite, an unceasing endeavour to
explore the limits of the Limitless, is one of the dominant notes of Rabindranath
Tagore’s lyrics. The ancient Indian artist who undertook to give shape to the
human conception of the divine, to carve the image of the Omniscient Being, possessing
limitless, infinite knowledge, union with whom or transformation into whose likeness is
tl e goal of spiritual life, was inspired by the same longing, though using a different
vocabulary. Who is the Omniscient Being possessing limitless knowledge? He is the
Jina (Tirthankara) of the Jaina, the Buddha of the Eauddha, the Siva of the Saiva, the
\ isnu of the Vaisnava. The kevala-jndna of the Jina, the sambodhi of the Buddha, the
dtma-jndna of Siva or Visnu, are but the different names of the highest, unlimited,
infinite knowledge conceived in different ways by the different sectaries. Ancient Indian
artists use the same plastic language for giving shape to these conceptions and thereby
reveal the basic unity of all Indian creeds. A brief analysis of this language will be
attempted in this note.

In the Kalpa-sutra of the Svetambara Jainas it is said of the last Jina Mahavira’s
attainment of the kevala-jndna: —

“During the thirteenth year, in the second month of summer,.

outside of the town Jhrmbhaka-grama on the bank of the river Rjupalika,.

in a squatting position with joined heels,.being engaged in deep medi¬

tation {jhdn’amtariyd=dhydndntarikd), reached the highest knowledge and intuition,
called kevala which is infinite, supreme, unobstructed, unimpeded, complete and full
( 120 ).

About Mahavira’s death it is said in the same work: —

“At the time of early morning, in the town of Papa, and in King Hastipala’s office

of the writers, (IMahavira) single and alone, sitting in the samparyanka posture.

died.freed from all pains.’’*

Sampaliamkanisanna in the original is explained by the commentator thus: —
Samgata-paryankah padmdsanarh tatra ni^anna upavistah?

“Sitting cross-legged on the hams is the lotus posture ; one seated in that posture.’’

> English translation by Jacobi, Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XXII, p. 263.
^ Sacred Books of the East, XXII, p. 269.

5 The Kalpa-sutra of Bhadrabdhu edited by H. Jacobi, Leipzig, 1879, p. 114.

277

THE BUDDHfi-BODHISftTTVft OF THE YEAR 64 RVALOKlTESVftRft FROM SRRNATH

THE BUDDHR-BODHISRTTVR FROM KRTRR FROM BODH-GRYR ( Indian Museum, Calcutta)

( Curzon Museum, Mathura) (Indian Museum, Calcutta)

PLRTE II PLRTE III

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

According to Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist texts Siddh^rtha (the future Gautama
Buddha), when quite young, performed the first dhyma sitting cross-legged under a
jambu (rose-apple) tree in a village inhabited by the ploughmen. Again, when, as a
monk, he found austerities useless, seated in the same posture under a Pipal tree at
Uruvela near Gaya he performed in succession the four dhyanas that led to sambodhi,
perfect knowledge, and thereby became a Buddha, ‘the omniscient one’. In the Pali
Vinaya (Mahdvagga I, 1) it is said: —

“At that time the blessed Buddha dwelt at Uruvela, on the bank of river Neranjara,
at the foot of the Bodhi tree, just after he had become Sambuddha. And the blessed
Buddha sat cross-legged (pallahkena nistdi) at the foot of the Bodhi tree uninterruptedly
during seven days, enjoying the bliss of emancipation.”^

From these extracts it is evident that the way to gain kevala knowledge or bodhi
which characterises the Omniscient Being, is the performance of dhydna, meditation,
called yoga or dhydna-yoga in the Brahmanic texts, seated in a set posture with joined
heels or cross-legged called in the Pali Buddhist texts as pallahkath (paryahkam)
abhujitvd. The posture is thus defined in the Pali Nikayas; —

“Sits (nisldati) cross-legged (pallankam dbhujiiva), holding the body erect {ujum kdyark
panidhaya), and sets up his memory in front of (the object of thought) (parimukharh saiim
upatthavetva).”

The dsana or posture of the yogin defined in the Svetdhatara Upanisad (II. 8-10),
the Vedanta-sutras (IV. 1, 4-11) and the Bhagavad-glta (VI. 11-13) is evidently the same
cross-legged posture. A graphic description of it is found in Kalidasa’s Kumdra-sambhava
(III. 45-50),’ wherein the poet pictures Siva engaged in performing dhydna seated cross-
legged (paryahka-bandha) on an altar under a Devaddru (oak) tree, like Gautama under
the Pipal tree at Uruvela. The scholiast Mallinatha (on Kumdra III, 45) quotes a
stanza attributed to Vali§tha, wherein the posture is named Virdsana, ‘hero’s posture’.
All seated images of the Jinas and almost all seated images of the Buddhas show this
paryanka-bandha posture.

Broadly speaking, the Jinas of the Jainas and the Buddhas of the Bauddhas correspond
to the Purusas, spirits or souls, who, according to the orthodox Samkhya and Yoga
systems, have obtained Kaivalya, final isolation, emancipation, through the attainment
of the highest knowledge, while Siva of the Saivas and Visnu of the Vaisnavas correspond
to the lhara. Lord, of the Yoga system of Patanjali, who is but one of the Purusas
ipuru^a-vise^a) who has never been subject to the law of karman and rebirths and whose
omniscience is unlimited {niratiiaya).* Uike the JSvara, Visfiu or Siva has not attained
this unlimited omniscience by practising yoga, but it is the essence of his being. Images
of Siva and Vispu in full paryanka-bandha posture are rare. But the most important
feature of this posture, the pose of the eyes fixed on the tip of the nose, is found in all

* Translated by Rhys Davids and H. Oldenberg, Sacred Books of the East, Vol, XIII, pp. 73-74.

5 For this reference I am indebted to Mr. Sudhanya Knmar Sarkar.

* Yoga-darSana or PStaHjala-darfana, I. 24-25.

278

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

their images whether seated or standing. The significance of this pose of the eyes is
discussed by Sankara in his comment on the Bhagavad-gUd VI. 13. The stanza runs ; —

samam kdya-Hro-gnvam dhdrayann acalarh sthirah,
sampreksya ndsikdgrath svarh di^a^ cdnavalokayan-.

“Holding the body, the head, and the neck erect, immobile and steady, fixing the
gaze on the tip of his nose and not looking in other directions.’’

Commenting on the first part of the second line of this stanza, Sankara writes : —

“(As if) observing one’s tip of the nose. Here ‘as if’ {iva) should be considered as
understood. The observation of the tip of one’s own nose is not provided. What then
(is provided) ? The mechanical direction of the sight of the eyes (to the tip of the nose
is provided). This also has been provided for the concentration of the mind. If the
observation of the tip of the nose be provided, the mind would concentrate itself on that
and not on the ‘self.’ The concentration of the mind on the ‘self’ (in yoga) is provided in
(the text), ‘Fixing the mind on self’ {Bhagavad-gUd, VI. 25). Therefore by adding the
word iva, ‘as if,’ though omitted, sampreksya is to be understood as denoting the mechani¬
cal direction of the eyes’ sight (but not observation).”

This pose of the eyes which indicates samddhi, rapt concentration, characterises not
only the images of the Jina, the Buddha and other omniscient beings seated cross-legged,
but also their images seated in other postures, as well as their standing images. So eyes
fixed on the tip of the nose must be recognised as the common factor of all varieties of
yoga posture, and in an image the mark of limitless omniscience.

The earliest representations of deities seated in the yoga posture are found on seals
unearthed at Mohen-jo-Daro in Sind and at Harappa in the Panjab. In a note on excava¬
tions at Mohen-jo-Daro in 1924-25 Sir John Marshall writes: —

“On a tablet of blue faience which has just come to light is depicted a figure seated
cross-legged (like Buddha on a throne) with a kneeling worshipper to right and left and
behind the worshipper a snake (ndga), while at the back is a legend in the pictograpliic
script of the period. Now, it is possible that the seated figure is nothing more than a
royal personage, but the presence of the kneeling devotees and particularly of the ndgas
certainly suggests that the central figure was intended to represent a deity rather tli gn
a king.’”’

The pose of the eyes is not noted here, and it cannot be expected that in a figure
carved on a small seal it should be clearly marked. But a fragment of a bearded statuette
of stone and paste found at Mohen-jo-Daro, of which one of the inlaid eyes and the nose
are well preserved, clearly shows eyes fixed on the tip of the nose.* Dike the figure on
the seal seated cross-legged this statuette was probably also intended for worship. What
this posture denoted in the Chalcolithic period it is now diflScult to say. Though a gap

^ A. S. I., A. R., 1924-25, p. 61.

* A. S. I., A. R., 1925-26, p. 90, pi. XLII (a); Coomaraswamy, History of Indian and Indonesien
Art, London, 1927, p. 3, pi. I; Memoirs A. S. I., No. 41, p. 25, pi. I (b).

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

of nearly three thousand years separates these figures in yoga, posture from our earliest
known images in the same posture, it is impossible to suppose that the tradition was
wholly lost.

The earliest known Jina images seated cross-legged in meditation are found on tablets
of homage recovered from the Kankali Tila at Mathura and now deposited in the Tucknow
Provincial Museum. Two of these tables* bear votive inscriptions in Brahmi characters
that closely resemble the characters used in the Brahmi inscriptions of the time of the
Mahak§atrapa Sofiasa who reigned about the beginning of the Christian era. The
figures of the Jina on these tablets are crude in workmanship and the posture is not
correctly rendered. The accession of Kanishka about a century later gave a strong
impetus to the manufacture of the Buddha images in Gandhara and Bauddha and Jaina
images at Mathura. The flowing hair, the musculature of the limbs, and the drapery
arranged in naturalistic folds that distinguish most of the Buddhas of the Gandhara school
are Hellenistic in style. The craftsmen of Mathura of the Kushan period produced three
different types of images of the Buddhas and the Jinas (other than l^sabha), the latter
being distinguished from the former by total absence of drapery. These types are;
(1) shaven head with a top-knot of hair curling like a shell (so far found in the Buddha
images only) and plain drapery sticking to the body; (2) head with short hair in ringlets
curling to the right and in the images of the Buddha drapery arranged in naturalistic
folds in the Gandhara style ; (3) head with hair arranged in conventionalised waves and
in the images of the Buddha drapery arranged in the Gandhara style.*"

As the craftsmen of Mathura borrowed the style of drapery of the images of Buddha
of types (2) and (3), and probably the arrangement of hair of type (3), from the school of
Gandhara, the Gandharan (Indo-Greek) craftsmen borrowed in their turn from Mathura
arrangement of hair in ringlets which only a comparatively small number of images of
the Buddha produced in Gandhara show.** It was the image of the Buddha resulting
from the combination of types (1) and (2) (Iplain drapery sticking to the body or drapery
with folds marked by conventional superficial lines, and hair arranged in ringlets on the
head) that carried on the dig-vijaya or conquest of the Buddhist world outside Mathura
and Gandhara.

From the second century B.C. onward there flourished in Central and Eastern India
a school of art which was non-representational so far as the Buddhas and the Jinas were
concerned, but which represented them by symbols such as empty throne, foot-prints, the
wheel of law and so forth. From the beginning of the reign of Kanishka (the votive
inscription on the colossal Bodhisattva at Samath dedicated by the monk Bala is dated in
the year 3 of his reign) we find images of Gautama Buddha of Mathura stone and work-

® y. A. Smith, The Jaina Stupa and other Antiquities oj Mathura, Allahabad, 1901, plates VII and
X: Coomaraswamy, History, &c., plate XIX, Fig. 71.

Vogel recognises types (1) and (2), and of type (1) he writes, "These images cannot be imme¬
diately derived from any known class of images in Gandhara”; it is “d’nn type local.” (A. S. I.,
A. R., 1909-10, p. 66; La Sculpture de Mathura, Ars Asiatica, XV, Paris, 1930, p. 39).

11 Bachhofer, Early Indian Sculpture, Paris, 1929, Vol. I, p. 106.

280

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

manship imported to centres of Buddhism in Central and Eastern India like Sanchi, Bodh-
Gaya, Sarnath and Sravasti. It is possible to follow the development of the Gupta type
of the image of the Buddha from the Kushan type of the Mathura school step by step in
the specimens deposited in the Museums at Mathura and Sarnath. But between images
of the Buddhas and the Jinas produced by the Mathura school in the Kushan period (second
century A.D.), and images produced at Mathura and elsewhere in the Gupta period
(A.D. 350-500) there is a vast difference. Let us take one of the best products of the
Mathura school of the Kushan period, the inscribed Buddha-Bodhisattva statuette from
Katra in the Mathura Museum, reproduced on plate I, for comparison. This image is
carved with considerable skill and does not lack vitality. But the eyes, though half-shat,
are not correctly posed, and the face is devoid of expression. The Kushan art of Mathura
is a dead art of repetition.

With the establishment of the Gupta empire in the fourth century A.D. a miracle
happened in the field of art. The dead suddenly began to pulsate with vigorous spiritual
life. This transformation is first illustrated by an image of the Buddha-Bodhisattva of red
sandstone of Mathura discovered by Cunningham at Bodh-Gaya and exhibited in the
Indian Museum, (plate II). The votive inscription on the base of this image is dated
in the year (Sathvat) 64 which should be assigned to the Gupta era and corresponds to
383-384 A.D.^^ So close is the typological resemblance that a comparison of this image
with the Katra image suggests that it (3' 11" x 3' 1") is but a mechanical enlargement of the

A. S. L, A. R., 1922-23, p. 169. Cunningham took the year 64 to represent 464 of the Seleukidan
era equivalent to 152 A.D. by omitting hundreds (MahSbodhi, London, 1892, p. 53). Foucher recog¬
nizes Safhvat 64 as a year of the Saka era equivalent to 143 A.D. (L'art GrSco-Bouddhique du Gandhara,
Tome II, Paris, 1922, p. 681). The assignment of the year 64 to the Gupta era has been accepted by
Dr. Coomaraswamy {History, of Indian and Indonesien Art, p. 85; Riipam, 1930, Nos. 42-44, p. 8) and
Di. Scherman {Sonderabdruck des Munchner Jahrbuches der Bildenden Kunst, 1928, Bd. V. Heft 3,
p. 148, note 34). Dr. Stella Kramrisch, who recognises the Bodh-Gaya image as the starting point of the
Gupta art, takes Samvat 64 to be a year of the Kalacuri era equivalent to 312 A.D. {Wiener Beitrage zur.
Kunst und KuUurgeschichte Asiens, Band V, 6. 15). No epigraph dated in the early centuries of the
Kalacuri era has yet been discovered around Mathura and Bodh-Gaya {Epigraphia Indica, Vol. V,
Appendix p. 55). Bachhofer follows Foucher {Early Indian Sculpture, p. 104). Not only the style of the
Bodh-Gaya image, but the form of the letters of the inscription renders the ascription of the date to the
Saka era impossible. These letters differ from the letters of the Kushan inscriptions on the one hand,
and agree with those of the Gupta inscriptions on the other, in the following particulars : —

(1) Excessive elongation of the vertical of ka and ra and the right hand vertical of a.

(2) The division of the original vertical of no and of its upper bar.

(3) The transformation of the lower triangular half of ma into a horizontal line projecting
to the left of the letter.

(4) The left limb of the la turned sharply downwards.

(5) Ha with hook-like shape, the base-stroke turned to the left as in the horizontal base-
stroke of ha in the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudra-gupta.

But, as compared to the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudra-gupta, this inscription retains
na and fa of the archaic type. In an inscription on a pillar (recently discovered at Mathura) dated
in the year 61 of the Gupta era (380-381 A.D.) in the reign of the Emperor Chandra-gupta II the
angular Kushan forms of ga, na, pa, ma, la, £a, sa, ha are retained side by side with the Gupta form
of na. But any inscription dated in the Kushan era of Kanishka containing Gupta type of letters is
unknown. Therefore the occurrence of a considerable number of Gupta letters in any inscription
justifies the assignment of it to the Gupta period.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

latter (2' x 1' 8"). But a closer examination reveals a great difference. Hair in
ringlets covers the head and a fleshy protuberance takes the place of the spiral top-knot.
The Kushan formula of showing the half shut eyes gives place to a more realistic repre¬
sentation. Though the left eye of this image is destroyed the face retains its wonderful
expressiveness. The right eye fixed on the tip of the nose reveals a mind concentrated
on something within. That something is sambodhi or kevala-jnano., infinite, limitless,
perfect knowledge. Civilized man, oppressed by the limitations that limited knowledge
imposes upon his activities, has ever conceived the vision of a Being with limitless know¬
ledge as his guide and goal, but never has he succeeded in giving that vision a plastic
form as convincing as in India in the Gupta period.

The bulky torso and the heavy limbs of the Bodh-Gaya image and other images produced
at Mathura in the Gupta period accord ill with the expression of the face. The refinement
of the type was carried out by the sculptors of Benares who carved images of the Buddha
and the Mahayana deities for the monastery at Mrga-dava (Sarnath). A masterpiece of
Gupta art from Sarnath, an image of the Mahayana god Avalokitesvara (3' 7i" high),
exhibited in the Indian Museum, is reproduced in plate III. In the modelling of the
body of this figure delicacy is combined with breadth, and in its face beauty of form is
combined with profound depth of expression. The Gupta artist had to work under
certain disadvantages. Stiffness is more or less inherent in the posture of dhydna, and
in modelling the body the artist could not draw inspiration directly from nature, but
had to show the marks of the mahdpurma (superman) which involved the adoption of
a rigid formula. But within these limitations the Gupta artist achieved perfection.
This art, born in a workshop of Mathura in the second half of the fourth century A.D.,
thrived for eight centuries, though gradually losing spontaneity and freshness and gradually
overwhelmed by details. Sculpture fell into a state of atrophy after the Muhammadan
conquest at the end of the twelfth century A.D. There was a revival of Hindu painting
four centuries later. The theme of this art is the lild, sport, of Krsna and Siva, performed,
not in an absent-minded fashion while engaged in dhydna-yoga as in the Gupta and the
post-Gupta reliefs, but with open watchful eyes. The lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore once
again fill our minds with the same longing for the realisation of the Aiesa, the Limitless, like
the images of the Omniscient Being fashioned in the Gupta period :

ieser madhye aJes ache —
ei kathd-tl, mane

aj-ke dfridr gdner sese

jdgche ksane ksane.

CALCUTTA

RAMAPRASAD CHANDA

282

THE GODS OF INDIA*

T he Vedas and Epics set forth several distinct cosmologies and myths of creation,
and present us with a pantheon tantalisingly confused, with many functional
doublets and a successive emergence of new names of the supreme and other
deities, major and minor, only clarified here and there by an intuition that all these
represent concepts of human origin imposed upon an ultimate ineffable One. Apart from
this philosophic or mystic scission of the Gordian knot, is it possible to find a rational
order in the actual theology? Obviously, this cannot be done by a tabulation of family
relationships, functions, and myths, for the former are shifting and unconstant, and the
latter never exclusively attached to any one individual. If at all, it can only be done by
means of an historical untangling of the twisted threads.

Some light first appears when it is realised that Vedic theology presents us v.dth a
mixture of two conflicting types of divinity, Asuras and Devas, typically represented by
Varuna and Indra. In the conflict, the Devas are nominally victorious ; and yet it is not
Tndra, but Visnu (whose name is unimportant in the Vedas) who emerges as the great king
of righteousness, cosmic ruler, and ultimate ideal. This Visnu, alike in majesty and moral
grandeur, and in matters of mythology and iconographic formulation, is more like Varuna,
himself the noblest conception of the Vedas, than any other of the older gods. Thus, in
brief, Varuna is lord of holy order, and Visnu, particularly as conceived in the person of
Riima, embodies the Hindu concept of righteousness ; and are not ria and dharma one and
the same eternal Law? Both Varuna and Vi§nu are types of the ideal king upon whose
virtue [virya, ‘mana’) depend the fall of rain in due season and the fruitfulness of the
earth. The actual creation proceeds from a tree that springs from Varuna’s navel as he
rests upon the primeval W aters ; and in turn, from a demiurge who is lotus-born from a
stem that springs from Visnu’s navel as he too lies recumbent on the Waters at the com¬
mencement of a new cycle of creation. Varuna and Visnu are each of the colour of the
firmament. The identity of Varuna and Visnu is actually asserted in the Agni Pur ana.

Has the conception, then, of the Great King of the Universe persisted dominant from
a time before the Vedas to the present day? It is true that Varuna, under this name,
declined to a lesser status as god of the sea, and that it is customary to differentiate sharjdy
the Epic from the Vedic mythology. In reality, the continuity is veiled only thinly by
changes of name. There is a succession of cosmic progenitive deities, Prajapati, Visvakar-
man, the Unborn, the Self-Existent, Brahma, Narayana, and of related types, Tvastr,
Daksa, whose names are for the most part epithets ; and with these are connected many of
the myths and conceptions elsewhere attached to Varuna and Visnu. These epithets do

*Mnch of the detailed evidence for the point of view here expressed, together with references to
other recent literature on the subject, will be found in my Yaksas, and Yaksas Part II, Washington
1928 and 1931.

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

not represent new deities, but are designations reflecting the imagination of successive
periods, and usurping the place of older names which of necessity therefore retained only
a more limited application or connotation. That at any one time a given deity has count¬
less names and epithets is a familiar fact of Indian, and indeed of other mythologies: we
recognize, for example, the identity of Kubera and Vai^ravana, even that of Kubera and
Jambhala, or Kubera and Pancika ; and it is no less proper to recognize an identity in any
deity whose names and epithets are distributed along the line of time, when the evidence
of persistent character and myths is available.

Somewhat similarly the Asura deity Agni, originally a great cosmic principle, becomes
merely the god of fire and messenger of the gods, while much of his character and myths
are inherited by the red god, the ‘blue-throated’ Siva-Rudra.

To take another case, a feature typical of Hindu theology is the conception of the
supreme deity as Two-in-One—Purusa and Prakrti, Siva-Sakti, Laksmi-Narayana, etc.
This concept of polar types, Supreme Male and Mother-Mate, appears from the beginning
in Varuna and Aditi. Are not Aditi, Ida, Vak, Gauri, Laksmi, in fact the Devi in every
aspect one and the same ? So too with lesser genii: the Gandharvas and Apsarases,
originally the ‘people’ of Varuna and Soma, powerful and even dread progenitive deities,
soon come to be no more than the musicians and dancers of Indra’s court, but their original
character and functions are carried on by the Yaksas and Yaksis. Yaksa was once a term
of high respect, and there is no Indian deity, however exalted, who is not in one place or
another referred to by this title ; nor even in later times are the Yaksas anywhere clearly
distinguished from other deities and spirits, all of whom, except only the Supreme Cosmic
God, have once been mien and will in due course be reborn as men.

Again, the oldest cosmology is a belief in the origin of life in the Waters, and its
perpetuation and renewal by means of the soma or rasa, an Essence in the Waters that
falls from heaven in rain and is the basis of all propagation and increase. This cosmology
has for its iconography the Plant Style as we find it when Indian art is first extensively
preserved in permanent material, and as this so-called ‘decorative’ art has persisted to
the present day.

Thus Hinduism emerges, not as a post-Vedic development, a theistic declension from
the lofty visions of the Upani§ads, but as something handed on from a prehistoric past,
ever-changing and yet ever essentially itself, raised at various times by devotional ecstasy
and philosophic speculation to heights beyond the grasp of thought, and yet preserving in
its popular aspects the most archaic rites and animistic imagery.

Behind Varuna and Aditi, Ahura Mazda and Anahita, lie Tammuz and Ktar. All
goes back to early cultures dependent on agriculture and irrigation ; ultimately to a time
when theology was hardly yet conceived, but welfare seemed to depend on a mysterious
energy underlying all the operations of life, an energy scarcely personified, but which
could be instigated by rites of sacrifice and sympathetic magic. A ‘god’ then implied,
not a known person, but a dramatisation of a man’s direct experience of forest or river,
cloud or mountain, birth or death. A combination of many such experiences induced the

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

view that behind them lay a person or persons whose character might be inferred from that
of the manifestations themselves, and who could be pleased or displeased ; and hence arose
theology and worship, distinct from magic. It is the peculiar value of India to the student
of humanity that we find here not only an agelong historical continuity extending from
prehistoric times to the present day, but even at the present day every essential stage of
the development, from the worship of the vegetative powers to the knowledge of the Self
that is ‘Not so.’ At all times the gods have assumed the forms imagined by their worship¬
pers ; their lineaments are a function of the relation between the worshipper and the object
of his devotion. Nothing has been rejected, but all finds its place in a gradated synthesis
of elements adapted to every mental age ; and here only therefore has the true meaning of
tolerance been understood, here only could it have been said, believed, and acted upon
that true teaching consists not in imparting a new kind of truth, but in assisting men to
understand still better their own kind of truth.

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, ANANDA K. COOMARASWAMY

BOSTON, U.S.A.

285

MARKS OF THE GREAT BEING: MAHAPURUSA-LAKSANA

T hat the world originated from Man, created out of himself or as a result of his
dismemberment, is a belief recorded in some of the oldest sacred writings in India.
By creation or by sacrifice, Man is transmuted into the Universe. This Man is
the Superman, the Great Being, the Mahapurusa. To conform with his action his body
is impressed with insignia of the cosmos, while at the same time it incorporates standards
of human perfection and others for which no canon of beauty has laid down the rules,
but which have the sanction of remotest antiquity, to such an extent that their meaning
had been as much taken for granted as it had become obscure even in the earliest texts
that mention them.

Brahmanical as well as Buddhistic writings enumerate the marks of the Mahapurusa ;
yet such marks that can be rendered in plastic terms are almost exclusively confined to
the image of Buddha. They are there in their proper places, from the days when the first
image of Buddha was created, about the middle of the first century B.C. This may appear
strange, because the Mahapurusa-laksana, the marks of the Great Being, are connected
with the Brahmans, and with the art of soothsaying, as one of their special activities ; they
were, however, appropriated by the Buddhistic texts.

The Buddha being looked upon as the Mahapurusa is endowed with his marks. The
Brahmanical pantheon, on the other hand, is represented by many divinities, none of
whom, however, as rendered by the sculptors, claim to embody the Mahapurusa. And
yet, being divinities, some of them have a few marks that are their prerogatives, or other
signs closely related to them. The question then arises how this came about.

The notion of the Great Being had shaped itself in the mind of the Aryan invaders
of India. But while at that time there existed images of gods, they belonged to those
people whom the Northern invaders had found in the country and to whose artistic genius
they gradually had to open their doors. Their own conceptions of divinity, on the other
hand, were supra-visual. A comparison of the earliest images of Buddha with those of
Brahmanical gods of the same age shows the visualised results of speculation in the first,
and a spontaneous naturalism in the latter instance. (Cf. for example the Siva-lingam
from Gudimallam).

Buddhism at first had been reluctant to allow the fashioning of any likeness of the
Exalted One. Yet, using the art of the country that was teeming with figures of all beings,
it had to succumb to the creative onrush of the pre-Aryan people. The critical moment
fell into the first century B.C. when those conditions seem to have been agreed upon, under
which it was permissible to make an image of the Blessed One. Those conditions were that
he should be rendered in the likeness of the Mahapurusa endowed with his signs and
differing altogether from the gods of those outside Buddhism. Thus in the fashioning
of the Buddha image a survival of Aryan formulae of vision becomes imprinted on
bodily appearance, the latter being the vital share the pre-Aryans have in it.

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The 32 marks of the Superman to the greater part refer to an ideal beauty of the body
on the basis of normal human appearance. A few, however, transgress the ordinary human
figure, not in the sense of the ideal, nor in that of the supernatural. They are formulated
in the past tense of the corresponding feature of the present day appearance. They refer
to one or the other characteristic trait of pre-historic man and have no further meaning.
‘Standing and without bending he can touch his knees with either hand, he evenly touches
the earth with the entire surface of the foot, he has projecting heels.’ Such are the
physiognomical peculiarities that can be, and are rendered by the sculptor and painter,
whereas that the number of his teeth is forty, as laid down in the texts, points to the
same direction. The golden age, the glorification of the past, satisfy in a wider sense that
longing for a better state which the regret of having fallen aw’ay from it keeps the more
poignant,—the more sharply some of those past qualities or features are still remembered.
In this respect the Mahapurusa is not the omnipresent but the past-present human, without
au allusion to his transcendental nature.

Not of historical and descriptive origin, but cosmical and symbolical ‘wheels appear
thousand spoked on the soles of his feet.’ The artist, however, goes further than the
texts. He imprints palms as well as soles with the mark of the wheel. He goes still
further and places behind the head the wheel we call halo. These sun-wheels, of necessity,
are small when carried on hands and feet, and there is not much scope for elaborate and
loving decoration. Yet even then the spokes are so indicated that the wheel appears
transformed into a lotus with open petals.

Spokes of the wheel, rays of the sun, petals of the lotus are interchangeable with the
Indian craftsman from an early date. When Buddhist art knew of no icon of the Buddha
as yet, the disc of the sun-lotus wheel is one of the most frequent devices that decorate the
carved railings of the early Buddhist Stupas. There (at Bharhut) these round medallions of
large size are filled with concentric circles of radiantly luscious lotus petals, or a disc formed
by rays is centre of the lotus medallion and background at the same time, or a human bust,
or the lotus-sun device occupies the centre and around it in concentric rings animals,
pliantastic or real, or floral creepers, or chains of jewellery are displayed,—the life, in short,
and the precious beauty of this world. The plastic rendering of the sun-wheel, that was to
adorn palms and soles and to surround the head of the Buddha image, was prior to the
conception of the latter. It is an ancient Northern symbol that stands for nature mani¬
fested as an expression of the supreme source of life. This is called Hvaremh in the
Avesta. This lotus-like sun (and water) wheel, surrounded by a ring of strutting animals,
moreover, may be found on one of the silver vases from Maikop in South Russia of the
3rd millenium B.C. (Strzygowski, Asiens Bildende Kunst, p, 98). When in the
efflorescence of Indian art in the Gupta period, the Buddha image (images of the fifth and
sixth centuries A.D.) did attain fulness of spiritual penetration and of sensuous
loveliness, the large halo that surrounds its head unfolds in concentric rings the wealth of
flora] creepers and the precision of wrought chains of jewelry.

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The wheel lak§ana of the Mahapuru§a impressed on soles and palms of the Buddha
(predominantly in the earlier images) is based on a recollection dim but mighty. The
artist gave wider scope to it than the texts. The halo that surrounds the head of the
Buddha as centre of light and life spiritual had been a familiar decorative device in ancient
India, but its ancestry points back into a far-away past in the North.

Another and one of the most important and controversial marks of the Buddha image
and of the Superman is the usntsa. Invariably the sculptors fashioned it as a protuberance
on the top of the head or else as a head taperingly drawn into height. (For the latter,
cf. Buddha from Amardvatl, 3rd century A.D. in W. Cohn’s Buddha in der Kunst des
Os tens, pi. 19 ; or the Mankuwad image of mid-sixth century).

This cranial abnormality is a condition sine qua non of all the Indian and further
Indian Buddha images. It appears, with the rest of the skull covered by ringlets of locks,
in the majority of Buddha images, but it is fashioned already prior to the earliest Buddha
images in a pillar figure from Bodh-gaya of the early 1st century B.C., where, however,
a fillet-like device lines this peculiar coiSure against the forehead, suggestive of a wig ;
wig-like too is the head-dress of considerable height, consisting of a mass of short ringlets
distributed over the entire wig, including the usni?a on top, in a relief from Gandhara,
showing the Bodhisattva (Coomaraswamy, History of Indian and Indonesian Art, fig. 93).
These are the only instances of a kind of ufnisa not on the head of Buddha himself.

Ancient as well modern interpreters of the u^ni^a in literature, considerably differ in
their conclusions. The images, however, clearly show that the usntsa is an excrescence of
the head itself ; whether the hair covers it in carefully arranged waves, whether the long
hair is twisted and coiled about it, whether cut short, it encompasses skull and usntsa or
the heightened skull in parallel rows of conventionalised curls. What does this cranial
protuberance, the usntsa of the Mahapurufa, mean on the head of the Buddha?

A distinction of almost all Indian divinities, excepting the Buddha, is to wear high
crowns or else to have matted locks piled up into an intricate and high edifice. To add
to the height of the divinity by a high crown or high coiffure and to make this addition
just above the head is a means by which their loftiness is enhanced. In this respect, the
usntsa of the Buddha has a similar aim. Yet a further component, however, has to be
considered. In Mohen-jo-daro (3rd millenium B.C.) some of the heads show a peculiar
formation of skull which seems over-high on top. At the present, in some parts of
Burma the infant’s head is swathed and so compressed as to make it grow in height, in
preference to all other extension, following the belief that the child hereby may become
clever in later life. In the Far East, although not before the Ming dynasty, the popular
god of Longevity is endowed with an absurdly high head.

The high cranium, be it as an ethnical characteristic or an individual occurrence only,
hud been understood by the Brahman sooth-sayers as seat of an exalted mind. In a
popular form this belief in Burma is alive to the present day ; in the Far East, the notions
incorporated in the high skull rose from people’s opinion into the w'orld of art not before,
however, the Buddha image that hitherto had been inconceivable without the usntsa had

288

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

been bereft of that attribute of his by the artists of the 12th century and later, who in
their paintings frequently rendered a round and bald patch, in lieu of the usnlsa, surrounded
by shaggy black hair. The supernormal shape of the Buddha’s head then only had been
dispensed with and was replaced by the tonsure of the monk.

The usnlsa, it follows, pre-existent to the image of the Buddha and interpreted as seat
of an exalted mind, or of a special faculty of mind, had to be one of the marks of the Great
Being, and therefore of the Buddha, when his image came to be made. It is probable
that, to suggest this loftiness of mind, wigs may have been worn with the usnlsa (Cf.
BodhI-gaya pillar figure and Gandhara relief whereas later on all other Indian divinities
precluded from the possession of an usnlsa like that of the Buddha were by compensation
endowed with high crown or coiffure.

The urna, a hairy mole between the eyebrows, another of the 32 laksana of Mahii-
purusa, is shown in a large number of Buddha figures as a, small hemisphere, either carved
in the same material as the image itself or inset in a more precious material. It is not
accidental that a number of images, though never that of the Buddha, show the middle of
the forehead marked by the third eye, whereas to this day devotees have the middle of
their forehead occupied by their respective sectarian marks (tilaka), while women
of the Northern half of India and people of both sexes in the South favour an auspicious
mark painted with vermilion or applied with cut beetle wings where the Buddha has the
vestige of the ‘third eye’, i.e., the sense organ of a lost faculty of perception. The urna
seems to be the version specifically selected for the image of the Buddha. The texts
speaking of a hairy mole had altogether become out of touch with the original meaning.

Although not amongst the 32 laksana of the Mahapurusa, one further peculiarity is
indispensable to every Buddha image. These are, what is called ‘elongated ear-lobes.’ The
current interpretation is, that the Buddha when leaving the world gave up the heavy
earrings worn by royalty while the disfigurement of the lengthened ear-lobes persisted.
Yet not only are the ear-lobes elongated but the entire ear is expanded beyond its normal
length. Such an ear denotes a capacity of hearing, different from that of mortals. The
greatness of what it is capable of, and what it does hear cannot be taken in by ordinary
ears. The transcendental origin of that sound is hinted at by his large ears.

Such are the conspicuous marks of the Buddha image, of the Great Being. They were
kept alive in the creative memory of the craftsman long after their meaning had become
obsolete in literature. For the artist who visualizes the divinity of the image he is about
to give form to, cannot but make use of the human body as a simile for his God-vision.
As he transmutes the whole body into a vessel of contents superhuman, whose shape is
moulded by these contents, dim reminiscences of the past and attributes of the Superman
regain their meaning.

THE UNIVERSITY, CAECUTTA

STEBTA KRAMRISCH

INDIANS IN ASIA MINOR ?

T he oldest evidence of Aryan tribes in Asia Minor is derived from Kassite records,
particularly from some words preserved in a glossary containing the Babylonians’
equivalents of a few Kassite words. ^ Further evidence of some Aryan element in
Mesopotamia is given by the names of the Mitanni kings in the Tell-el-Amarna letters.^
But the material then at our disposal was scanty, it could not lead to any decisive result
and the problem remained unsolved. A new start was taken when in the year 1907
Professor H. Winckler® brought to light a treaty (dating from the 14th century B.C.)
between the Hittite king Subbiluliuma and the Mitanni king Mattiwaza, where more than
one hundred deities are invoked as witnesses to the treaty and where after the Babylonian
deities, Anu and Antrim, Enlil and Ninlil we read the following in the Mitanni version
of king Mattiwaza:

ildni Mi-it-ra-aS-sil ilani A-ni^na-as-sil In-da-ra ilani Na-sa-at-ti-yoran-na.

In the Hittite version of king Subbiluliuma the same gods are invoked, only instead
of A-ru-na is to be read U-ru-wa-na and instead of In-da-ra we read In-dar.

No doubt it was very strange to meet in Mesopotamia in the 14th century B. C. in a
list of deities the names of Vedic gods Mitra, Varuna, Indra and Nasatya, which clearly
sound either Aryan or Indian, but not Iranian, since the name Nasatya in accordance to
the Iranian phonology would require the form Naonhaithya*. Therefore Ed. Meyer and
with him most Indologists were of the opinion that those Indo-European people who came
to Mesopotamia in the 15th century or before that time were either Aryans or proto-
Iranians.® A small group differed. Professor Jacobi maintained that the gods mentioned
in the inscription were identical in form with Vedic gods and that the religion of the
tribe who imported them into Mesopotamia w'as essentially the same as Vedic religion as
far at least as concerns mythology.® The existence of Vedic gods in Mesopotamia in the
14th century B.C. seemed to agree wonderfully rvith his theory on the antiquity of the
Veda and he was convinced that the excavations at E-oghaz-koi were giving “an entirely new
aspect to the whole question of the antiquity of Indian civilisation.’’ Some scholars^ again

1 Cf. F. Delitzsch, ‘Die Sprache der Kossaer’ 1884; J. Scheftelowitz, K. Z. XXXVIII (1905), p. 270.
“I. A. Knuatzon, ‘Die zwei Arzawa-Briefe, die altesten Urkunden in indogermanischer Sprache,’
Leipzig, 1902.

2 H. Winckler, ‘Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient. Gesellschaft,’ December, 1907, p. 51. Since that
time the documents in question have been often published, translated and commented upon. Cf.
particularly E. F. WeiAner, ‘Politische Dokumente aus Kleinasien,’ Boghazkoi-Studien 7 (1922), pp. 32
and 54.

^ Cf. Chr. Bartholomce, ‘Altiranisches Worterbuch’, sub voce.

® Ed. Meyer, ‘Sitzungsberichte der k. preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,’ 1908, p. 14ff.:
Kuhn’s Zeitschrift, 42 (1909), p. 24.

» H. Jacobi. JRAS., 1909, p. 721, 1910, p. 456.

Cf. Paul Kretschmer in a very instructive article ‘Varuna und Urgeschichte der Inder’
W. Z. K. M. XXXIII (1926), p. 1., K. Z. 55, p. 78; B. Hrozny', ‘Die Lander Charri and Mitanni und die
altesten Inder,’ Archiv orientalni I (1929), pp. 91—110.

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGOBE

thought that the language from which the names of the Mitanni chieftains and the names
of gods were taken was pre-Indian, which view was supported by another document found
in Boghaz-koi containing terms on horse-training and some numerals, viz., na (or nawa,
Sanskrit nava), satta (Skt. sapta), panza (Skt. panca), and particularly aika (Skt. eha), the
Iranian form being aiva.^

From all this it has been deduced that an extreme branch of proto-Indians, migrating
to India, settled sometime in the second millennium B.C. in Mesopotamia and made for
itself a prominent place among the Mitanni people.

I do not agree with this view either, and venture to offer a difierent explanation. I am,
of course, quite aware that genuine and reliable material is extremely scanty, viz., we have
but (a) few names of kings, (b) of gods, and (c) a few numerals : (a) Sau^Mar ; Artatama

( = Skt. Rtadhdmd.}) ] Sutarna; Dtihatta; Mattiwaza {-Skt. Mativdja?) ; (b) Mitra ;
Aruna, Uruwana ; Indara ; Ndsatiyanna. ; (c) aika ; tera (ll(r)iera) ; panza ; satta ; na (nawa).
These words evidently belong to the same language. The script does not represent the
real sound of the words—it does not distinguish the aspirates and long vowels.

The vocabulary is undoubtedly Aryan. The stage of the language to which the words
belong could not have been Iranian, as the sibilants of several words {Cf. Nasatiyanna,
satta, the prefix sm-) indicate. It could not have been Indian either, as the name of the
king DuSratta clearly shows ; in Sanskrit, this would be Duratha. But I think it cannot
have been proto-Iranian or proto-Indian either. It seems to me that the name of the king
SauSSatar is a patronymic of the known Aryan type derived from su-satar^ that may be
connected with the Skt. root ia-‘to sharpen, to excite.’ Such compounds are, it is true,
not very common in Sanskrit, but they are not impossible ; cf. Vedic su-mdtr ‘having a
handsome mother,’ su-sanitf ‘a great dispenser.’ Now both in Sanskrit and Iranian (and
also Old Slavonic) the r-stems have lost their r in the nom. sg. ; cf. Skt. mdtd ‘mother,’ pttd
‘father,’ ^dstd ‘ruler,’ Avestan mdtd, pita, ddtd ‘Creator,’ Old Persian brdtd ‘brother,’ Old
Slavonic mati ‘mother,’ Lithuanian mote ‘wife.’ The r is retained by the western (centum)
languages, cf. Latin mater, pater, frater, Greek meter, pater.

Therefore it seems to me that the language of the Mitanni chieftains is neither proto-
Indian nor proto-Iranian, but represents with those two a third, yet unknown branch of
the Aryan group.

CZBCH UNIVERSITY, PRAGUE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA V. LESNY

* P. Jensen, ‘Indische Zahlworter in keilschrifthittitischen Textea’, Sitzb. der preus. Akad. del'
Wis. 1919, p. 867; E. Forrer, ‘Die Inschriften und Sprachen des Hatti-reiches,’ Z.D.M.G. 76 (1922),
p. 174; Sten Konow, ‘The Aryan gods of the Mitanni people’, Kristiania, 1921; A. B. Keith, ‘The Early
History of the Indo-Iranians,’ Bhandarkar Commemorative Essays, 1917, p. 81, The Indian Historical
Quarterly, I (1925), p. 16, The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads,’ 1925, p. 5;
Walter Porzig, ‘Rleinasiatisch-Indische Beziehungen, ZII. 5 (1927), p. 264.

* The double S is of little consequence in this case, cf. Mattiwaza—Skt. Mativaja (equation propased
by Walter Porzig, Z.I.-I., 5 (1927), p. 264).

UN ANCETRE DE TAGORE DANS LA LITTERATURE JAVANAISE

J E suis heureux de dedier cette etude au glorieux descendant de Bhatta Ndrdyana,
a mon cher ct grand ami Rabindranath Tagore. C’est de sa bouche que j’ai appris,
a Santiniketan, a I’occasion de la repr&entation d’un acte du Ventsamhdra, que ie
nom de Bhatta, Ndrdyana figure dans la liste rituelle de ses ancetres. Et ce memoire,
compose a son intention pour celebrer le yoe anniversaire de sa naissance, evoque avec
plus d’intensite que jamais dans ma memoire les jours heureux que nous avons,
ma femme et moi, passes pres de lui entre octobre 1921 et aout 1922. Appele par son
choix a inaugurer I’enseignement de I’orientalisme a la maniere occidentale dans
rUniversite de Visva-Bharatr qu’l fondait a ce moment, j’y ai appris beaucoup plus
que je n'y ai enseigne. Par Gurudev, comme nous Tappelons la^bas, par I’elite de
savants et de disciples qui se sont groupes autour de lui et qui vivent de son inspiration,
j’ai connu dans sa realite vivante cette ame de I’lnde que I’etude des textes m’avait
appris a admirer; c’est seulement a Santiniketan, au contact du Maitre et de son
entourage, que j’ai pu apprecier dans leur charme incomparable cette dignite de la
tenue, cette noblesse des sentiments, cette exaltation contenue de la pensee qui se
combinent sans effort avec une gaiete malicieuse, une fanta isie spirituelle, une douceur
exquise, et cette communion perpetuelle avec la nature qui donne a la vie journaliere
une teinte delicieuse d’eclogue virgilienne. L’homme qui a su creer et animer de sa
puissante personnalite cet Asram est bien I’heritier authentique de ces anciens rst’s
qui, retires dans leurs ermitages, concentres dans leurs meditations sans se detacher de
la vie, ont legue a I’lnde ces tresors de sagesse qui ont fait sa gloire.

A la fin du Xe siScle J.-C. r^gne sur la partie orientale de Java un grand prince, Sri
DharmmavaniSa teguh Anantavikramadeva. Rival et souvent adversaire du royaume de
Srivijaya (Palembang) qui avait cr6e dans Pile de Sumatra un magnifique foyer de culture
indienne, Dharmmavam^a donne a I’etude des textes sanserifs un vigoureux essor. Sur son
ordre, le Mah^BMrata est traduit en langue javanaise. L’ouvrage n’existe plus aujourd’hui
a Java meme ; mais la petite lie de Bali, dernier asile de la civilisation indienne dans
I’Archipel, en a conserve quelques sections. Friederich, ^ qui il faut toujours
remonter quand il s’agit de Bali, fut le premier 4 les signaler, dans son precieux
memoire sur Bali (Verhandel. Batav. Gen. XXII, 1849). Kern, en 1871, a public,
d’apres une copie preparee par Van der Tuuk, la table des matieres (Anukramapika) du
MahaBMrata javanais (Bijdr. T.fi.V.-kunde van N.I., 3e Volg. dl. VI, 1871) ; six
ans plus tard, il a donn6 une notice sur I’Adiparva, ofl il a reproduit le Pausyacarita,
texte javanais (kavi) et traduction (Verhand. K. Acad. Wet., afd. Rett. dl. XI, 1877).
Depuis, Juynboll a 6dit6 I’A^ramavfisa, le Mausala et le Mahaprasthana (1893), I’Adiparva
(1906), et le Virataparva (1912).

Re traducteur javanais a incorpor^ dans sa version, comme une garantie d’authenticit^
et de fid^lite, certains vers, ou fragments de vers, de I’original sanserif, dont il a donne la

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

glose litterale. En outre, il avait place en tete de chacun des parva’s des stances sanscrites,
dont le texte s’est facheusemant alters de copiste en copiste. Kern a deja fait connaitre la
stance initiate de I’Adiparva, mais il n’a pu en restituer que les trois premiers quarts. J’ai
pu moi-mSme pendant mon court s6jour k Bali (juin 1928), prendre copie des stances qui
ouvrent les quatre parva’s conserves, I’Adi, le Virafa, le Bhisma et I’Asramavasa. Je public
id ces vers, dans I’espoir qu’is pourront provoquer des recherches interessantes; un d’entre
eux tout au moins pose un probl6me curieux, comme on, va le voir. Je donne le texte tel
qu'il figure dans le manuscrit avec les confusions de caracteres si fr6quentes dans les mss.
balinais (la prononciation n’y distingue ni les sififiantes, ni les aspir^es, ni les dentales et
les cerebrales), et avec les coupures baroques introduites souvent ^ I’intdieur des mots ;
j’indiquerai ensuite les restitutions probables.

ADIPARVA

Ms. (1) jayati parasarasunus satya vMi hredayam-nanda no byasah-parasya sukfirti-
pathayi tva-v4mada saihkya sakSla jagatem-siva miti.

[Var. du ms. de Kern.para^arassfinus.sukfirtthiyitva...saka jugatSm.]

Kern a bien reconnu une arya, et il a restitu^:

jayati parHlarasfinus Satyavatihrdayanandano Byfisali
parasya sukh^rtthaheto.

(2) srotanjali putara vayavem-vitabhavSn bMrati ky^hem-mr6§a dukta mahl bhavStem
vrgsiii-krSsna dvaipiyana midem dadyat suphala jagatSdhayahi—pa^upati pandita krespa
jagat va macitam-sarva slokem paviya manah—kavi muktalj paralfiryah vivrgttl nyeti.

Je reviendrai plus loin sur ces vers.

VIRATAPARVA

Ms. (1) satreyo yastapa syandakari pura vanastarsa lasSni tevai-pumga yukto palese

visala pasula niryS punah kanya kartha-apadharmma pratikara janana kuSalo yasta

moratma putrah-kresna dvaipSyanS kyastha jayati bhagavan Irotryanem vi^esah.

Ee vers est clairement une sragdharS, et mSme fort correct au point de vue
metrique, sauf au second pfida pratikfira k rectifier en pratikara ; nSanmoins la restitution
est souvent douteuse ou embarrassante*:

Idktreyo yas tapasy andhakaripuravanasta w — — n— devaih
pumsS yuktopalebhe vimala ^ ^ — ya puna^ kanyakatvam.

fipaddharmapratiklrajananakusalo yas tayor fitmaputrah
krsnadvaipiyan^khyah sa jayati bhagavan ^rotriySnfim visesah:

Ms. (2) yasmS chra (var. chro) meti guna salika deya-s&rddh&na var§a §ata rohin^ssite
(var. spite)-ya (var. yad) dhairya varsa mita karastu s4-^ri dharmma vaih^a d-guh
anantavikramah

* Pour ce vers et les variantes, cf. outre I’fedition dn Vir&taparvan de fuynboll, I’ouvrage en danois
de K. Wulff, Den oldjavanske Wirataparvan, Copenhague 1917, p. 226-233.

293

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

On reconnaft une indravam^a k peine alt6r4e.I,e dernier pida, de lecture certaine,
garantit le metre ; il faut toutefois, contrairement k la prosodic sanscrite, kisser I’a final de
vam4a bref devant le mot javanais dgu (degu) qui fait partie du nom' royal. Te second pMa
semble exprimer une date avec les mots varsa 4ata ; en ce cas il faudrait y retrouver 918 kka,
date fournie par le texte meme en javanais (kavi), mais je iie vois pas comment on peut y
reussir. On peut essayer de restaurer ainsi:

yasm^t sravante guna^MikSdayah
sarddM ^ var§akta rohini site:
yaddhairyavarsamita-karis tu sah
gridharmmavathk dguh anantavikrama^,

BH1$MAPARVA

Ms. (1) kresnafigambhoda panktih kila kapila jata talikl vestamaiia-dhuliprenkadvalaka
pravitikya vak stotra pfijanya ghosa-yasya jnana pravarseh suka yati janata nila kanfa
pravahan-tamvan devya sasajnamyata manukretaye matraya tadvananam.

Be m^tre est la sragdhara, presque entkrement correct ; I’ensemble se restitue assez
facilement:

kr^nafigambhodapanktih kila kapikjatavestamano
dhfiliprenkhadbaiakaniratkayabakstotraparjanyagho§ah :
yasya jnanapravar§al;i sukhayati janatanikkanthapravahan
taiii vande vyasasarhjnayutam anukrtaye matraya tatpadanam.

Ms. : api ca (2) yas 4ri darayaca patih kalu loka phakh-tasyammano hari pada trayam eti
samrat-Sri dharmmavamkd-guh anantu maddhyam-sajnan nrepah pranida dhati
savikramantam.

Vasantatikka m6triquement correcte, mais avec une lacune au 3e pada ; la restitution
offre peu de difficultes. C’est ici encore un eloge du roi Sri DharmmavamSa deguh
Anantavikrama:

ya§ 4ridharo narapatih khalu lokapaias
tasya( ?)manoliarapadatrayam eti sainjna :

Sridharmmavariik d-guh [tadadim ?] anantamadhyam
sariijnam nipah pranidadhati savikramantam.

ASRAMAVASAPARVA

Ms.: asvamah pingaia jana padvakaia-paprangu pfindhava kresnatva kvadanah-sarvva
aioka padhartha vinokta kavi-mukta sarvva gasaia mi vrenonati.

Cette stance, d’un type metrique indefinissable, pr^sente au premier aspect un certain
nombre de mots ou d’41ements deja rencontres dans la seconde partie de la soi-disant stance
qui suit le vers initial de I’Adiparva. En effet, nous avons de part et d’autre: krespa. . .
tva. . . sarvaSloka (41okem). . . kavi mukta. . . vivrettinyeti (mivrenonati). L,e rappro¬
chement des deux morceaux permet de reconnaftre une des stances de benediction

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

conservees en Sanscrit par ua des manuscrits grantha, le G2 de T6dition Sukthankar. G2
lit an vers 13, metre mattamayflra, apr^s une serie de namask^ra:

abhraly&mah pingajat^baddhakalapak
pram^ur dandi kr§namrgatvakparidhanah
saksSl lok^n pavayamanah kavimukhyah
paraSaryah parvasu rdpam vivrnotu.

L’Asramavasa javanais (A§.) a fait asvamah de abhrasyamah, pingala jana de pingajatS,
padvikala de baddhakalipah ; paprangu p^ndhava (A^.) et pasupati papcjita de I’Adiparva
(Ad.) sont Tun et Tautre des alterations de Toriginal prariisur dandi ; kresna tvakvadanah
(As.) et kresna jagatvamacitam (Ad.) sont I’un et Tautre des alterations de krsnamrgatvsik-
paridhanah ; sarva§lokapadhartha vinoktakavi mukta (Ai.) et sarva^lokem pavayamanah
kavi muktah (Ad.) ramenent tons deux k saksal lokan pavayamanah kavimukhyah ; enfin
parasSryab vivrettSnyeti (Ad.) et sarvagaSala mivrenonati (Ai.) sont des debris du dernier
pada : para^aryah parvasu rdpaih vivrnotu.

Nous sommes done ramen^s k une recension de TInde m4ridionale ; rien de plus
naturel ; depuis les Pallavas jusqu’aux Cojas, TArchipel et le Sud de TInde sont unis par
des rapports frequents.

Je reviens maintenant aux stances initiates de I’Adiparva. Kem ne s’est essayl,
comme je Tai dit, ii restituer que la premiere, et seulement en partie. Pour les deux
suivantes, il se contente de declarer que ‘dans les deux vers sanscrits qui suivent, il
y a peu de chose ^ reconnaitre en dehors des noms propres Bhdratdkhyam et Krsna
Dvaipdyana. Ce qui est clair,, du moins, e’est que le contenu de ces deux vers, maintenant
mcconaissable, est en fait d’accord avec MahiBh^ata I, 17-19 (Calc, ed.).’ Nous pouvons
aujourd’hui pousser plus loin.

Tout d’abord il semble impossible de croire que les stances en Thonneur de Vyilisa
qui ouvrent les quatre parvan’s jusqu’ici accessibles, soient reellement Toeuvi'e du traducteur
javanais ; les stances en Thonneur de son patron royal Dharmmavam^a qui n’ont pas pu
naturellement Stre empruntees a des ouvrages d’origine indienne trahissent une gaucherie
de facture qui les distingue ftcheusement des autres ; quelle que doive 6tre la part de
responsabilite des copistes dans Tetat corrompu du texte, la maladresse et Tindigence de
Tauteur n’eclatent que trop visiblement. En outre, nous savons maintenant, gr&ce ^ la
precieuse ddition critique du MahaBharata donnee par TInstitut Bhandarkar de Poona, que
le premier hemistiche de la stance initiale—

jayati Para^arasfinus Satyavatihrdayanandano Vyasah

se lit au’ debut de la recension cachemirienne de Tepopee (ms. K3) ; le second
hemistiche est, k dire vrai, tout different:

yasyisyakamalakose vanmayam amrtam pibati lokah.

Nous sommes sans doute en presence d’un de ces exercices de pdda-purana si gofites
des versificateurs hindous ; une portion de vers etant donnee le po^te doit la completer ]:ar

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

une invention de son cru. Personne ne sera dispose, je pense, k croire que la recension
cachemirienne du MahaBharata est allde chercher k Java, dans une traduction en vieux
javanais du Xe si^cle, un h^mistiche d’adoration i Vyasa pour le placer en t§te du Maha-
Bh^rata. On est done forc6 d’admettre que le traducteur javanais a emprunte k I’lnde cet
liemistiche ; I’etat desesp6r6 du second li6niistiche dans le texte javanais ne pemiet
pas de discerner avec quelque vraisemblance s’il est une invention du traducteur javanais
ou s’il est copie d’un original indien. En tout cas, e’est un fait digne de con¬
sideration que le rapport s’dtablisse entre le MahaBhirata de Java et la recension
cachemirienne. J’ai deja. montre, k propos du RSmayana (Journ. As. 1918, 1, 135) que
e’est aussi a la recension cachemirienne de ce poSme que remonte I’imitation du
Digvarnana introduite dans un sutra bouddhique. Ea valeur des textes du Cachemire
se trouve done fortement dtablie ; en outre, dans le cas du Ramayana, le texte cachemirien
semble le mieux informe sur les lies de I’Archipel. I,a traduction javanaise montre, d’au-
tre part, que le texte d’un parvan du MahaBharata connu au Xe si^cle k Java etait celui
du Cachemire. Toute une sdrie d’autres indices semblent marquer des relations directes
entre le Nord-Ouest de I’lnde et les pays d’outre-mer k I’Orient.

Le second vers va nous reporter dans une autre direction. Kern y avait reconnu les mots
bhdratdkhyam et Krsna Dvaipdyana ; mais on pent en outre lire avec assurance au debut
les mots drotrdnjali. Ce sont Ik des repkres suffisants pour Stre tent6 d’y retrouver, puisqu’il
s’agit d’une glorification de Vyksa, le vers d’hommage qui ouvre le drame fameux du
Venlsamhkra, immkdiatement aprks la nkndi:

kravanknjaliputapeyam viracitavkn bhkratkkhyam amrtarii yah,

tarn aham arkgam atr§naih Krsna-Dvaipayanam vande.

L’accord est aussitot evident. Soulignons les portions communes qui se retrouvent dans le
texte javanais:

hotranjali puta ra vayaverii vitahhavdn bhdratd kyadh^m mreia dukia mahd hhavdtem
vresni kresna dvaipdyana, m idem.

srolrdhjali est une simple variante de dravandnjali; le mktre, kryk, s’accommode aussi
bien d’une lecture (_ _ , spondee) que de I’autre ^ _ anapkste). puta est identique k
puta ; les mss. de Bali confondent totalement dentales et ckrkbrales. ravaya se ramkne
aisement k peya dans cette kcriture, ofi la voyelle e, tracee k gauche de I’aksara (comme
en bengali) se distingue difficilement du ra. vemvitabhavdn recouvre viracitavdn, le m et
le c, comme dans la plupart des &ritures indiennes, se ressemblent ; le bha de bhavdn a
du ktre introduit par la fausse science d’un scribe, bhdratdkyahem est, comme Kern I’avalt
devine tout de suite, bhdratdkhyam. mresa (re est la notation du f Sanscrit) a conserve en
partie a)mr{t)a{m) ; duk s’est substitue k yas, j’ignore comment et pourquoi. Mais tamahd,
qui suit = tarn aham ; bhavdtem correspond k ardgam ou k quelque autre lecture ; vresni
repond k atrsnam ou k akrsnam, variante de plusieurs mss. ; la forme du v s’accommode
aussi bien k un fe qu’k un t. Enfin idem couvre en partie varhde.

Done e’est k I’auteur du Ventsamhkra, k Bhatta Nkrayana, que le traducteur javanais

296

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

a emprunt^ cet hommage a Vyasa. D’autres r^ussiront quelque jour a retrouver Torigine
des autres stances qu’il avait recopi^es. Bliatta N^ayana est, suivant une tradition toujours
admise, un des cinq brahmanes que le roi Adisura avait appel^s an Bengale pour y restaurer
la purete de la caste brahmanique. Ifa date de Adisdra a dte frequemment discutee ; d6j^
Wilson en 1827 (Hindu Theatre III, app. p. 27) assignait le Venisamhara au Vllle ou UCe
siecle ; nous pouvons desormais afErmer avec certitude qu’il est anterieur k la fin du Xe
siecle. Tes citations abondantes qui en sont donnees dans tons les traites de dramaturgie
et de composition poetique prouvent la haute reputation de ce drame. Qu’un ouvrage com¬
pose au Bengale soit parvenu a I’Archipel, il ii’y a pas lieu d’en etre surpris ; les relations
^taient regulieres entre les deux pays. C’est d Tamralipti, le grand port du Bengale, que
Yi-tsing s’embarque pour passer k Srivijaya (685). ^’inscription de Kelurak (782) atteste
qu'un des moines bouddhistes de la tradition du Bengale (Gau^idvipagurukrama) etait
alors le chapelain royal d’un roi Sailendra de Java, ^’inscription de N^landa, dans la
seconde moitie du IXe siecle (Ep. Ind. 1924, 310, 327) montre les Pala’s du Bengale engag&,
sous les auspices de la religion, dans des relations politiques avec une dynastie de Sumatra
(Suvarnadvipadhipamaharaja). Vers l’6poque m^me oh le MahaBharata est traduit en
javanais, le cHSbre Atlsa, qui devait jouer un r61e eclatant dans le bouddhisme au Tibet,
vient du Bengale k I’Archipel, probablem.ent ^ Sumatra (Suvaniadvipa), pour y com¬
pleter ses 6tudes sous la direction de Dharmmakirtti, grand prStre du pays (d6but du
Xle siecle).

Si un drame indien, et particuH^reraent un drame fond6 sur le MahaBharata, ^tait
connu a Java sous le regne de Sri Dharmmavam^a, I’hyiwthase d’une influence indienne sur
I’origine du thdatre d’ombres javanais, le wayang, gagne en vraisemblance. C’est justement
sous le successeur de DharmmavamSa, le grand roi Airlanga, que I’existence du wayang se
manifesto comme un fait positif, en rapport avec la composition de I’ArjunavivSha, la
premiere oeuvre originate en javanais fondee sur le MahaBharata (cf. Krom, Hindoe-
Javaansche Geschiedenis, p. 47-48 et note, et p. 265). On salt quel lien etroit a subsist6 au
cours des slides entre le wayang et la grande epopee hindoue.

( OLIvEGS DE FRANCE,
PARIS

SYEVAIN EEVI

RABINDRANATH TAGORE THE HUMANIST

T he humanism of Rabindranath Tagore has two aspects: the actuality of individual
joy and suffering in the concrete, with the reality of a world-culture of humanity
as its background. Both give full scope for creation, one in the life of action,
the other in the life of the spirit. Rabindranath has worked unwearingly' to relieve the
distress due to flood and famine, chronic poverty, ill-health, and want of education in his
own villages of Bengal ; equally untiringly he has endeavoured to spread to the four corners
of the world the message of the coming together of the races of mankind, of universal
humanity. The Poet is not interested in the arid region of abstract principles ; uplift has
no appeal for him. He does not believe in the cult of organized patriotism nor in that of
an unfocussed cosmopolitanism. His is not the philosophy of negation, of barren renun¬
ciation, but a realization completely comprehensive. Rabindranath has placed his faith
in the Kingdom of Man on earth, rich with the variety of human relationships. For him
true freedom lies in the growth of personality from the life of the flesh to the life of the
spirit which finds its supreme expression in the divinity of Man the Eternal.

Rabindranath was born in the atmosphere of the advent of new ideals in Bengal,
ideals ‘which at the same time were old, older than all the things of which that age was
proud.’

That atmosphere was created mainly by Ram Mohun Roy. The Poet has repeatedly
acknowledged that the first source of his inspiration was from that large-hearted man of
gigantic intellect:

Ram Mohun Roy was the first great man of our age with the comprehensiveness of mind to realize
the fundamental unity of spirit in the Hindu, Moslem, and Christian cultures. He represented
India in the fullness of truth based not upon rejection but on perfect comprehension. I follow
him, though he is practically rejected by my countrymen.

That atmosphere was a confluence of three movements—intellectual, spiritual, national
—all of which were revolutionary. The poet’s father Debendranath was the great leader of
that movement after Ram Mohun, a movement for the sake of which he suffered ostracism
and braved social indignities. The Poet was thus born in a family which had to live its
own life, and which made him seek guidance for his self-expression in his own inner
standard of judgment.

It is, therefore, not at all surprising that the Poet’s faith in his own country and
in a culture of universal humanity transcending all barriers of time and place both find
expression in his earliest writings. At the age of sixteen he discussed the promotion of
material prosperity in Bengal, and the possibilities of building up a new civilization through

298

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

the meeting of East and West in an essay entitled Hope and Despair of Bengalis* published
in the Bhdrati. The titles of other essays such as The Anglo-Saxons and their Literature,
Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and his Laura, Goethe’s Loves, Anglo-Norman Literature and
Tasso reveal his wide interests at this period (1878-80).

This was the time of the awakening of national sentiments in Bengal, traces of the
Poet’s share in which are left in a number of patriotic songs of which 'To you have I
dedicated my body and my spirit, my Motherland’ (1877) is probably the best known.

Along with the national movement occurred the neo-Hindu revival in Bengal. The
sentimental obscurantism and the bellicose patriotism of this pseudo-religious movement
repelled the Poet strongly, and with merciless logic and biting sarcasm he lashed the
smug self-satisfaction and shallow boastings in scathing satire in Boot-rations, Loud
Speaking, Tongue-waving, The Agitation of Neo-Bengalis, and in a small group of poems
in the Mdnasi: Wild Hopes, Up-lift of Our Country, The Heroes of New' Bengal, and
The Propagation of Religion. The anger of the Poet flamed up against the social thinking
which glorified caste and child-marriage and the sophistry which discovered pseudo¬
scientific justifications of unintelligent customs and fantastic superstitions in such essays as
Moustache and Eggs, Superiority of Monkeys, Truth, Hindu Marriage and in the poem
Love-making of a Newly-married Bengali Couple (1882-88). The darkest pictures were,
however, invariably relieved by a touch of humour.

Rabindranath was convinced that there could be no real political progress until social
injustices were removed. He asked his countrymen if the freedom to which they aspired
was one of external conditions. Was it merely a transferable commodity? Had they
really acquired a true love of freedom? Had they faith in it?

Unless we have true faith in freedom, knowing it to be creative, manfully taking all its risks, not
only do we lose the right to claim freedom in politics, but we also lack the power to maintain
it with all our strength. Men who contemptuously treat their own brothers and sisters as eternal
babies, never to be trusted in the most trivial details of their personal lives,—coercing them at
every step by the cruel threat of persecution into following a blind lane leading nowhere, often
driving them into hypocrisy and into moral inertia,—will fail over and over again to rise to the
height of their true and severe responsibility.

In all these discussions he maintained, however, a remarkable detachment of mind, and
although he always showed an enthusiastic appreciation of the intellectual greatness and
strength of character of the European nations, he vigorously denounced the habit of blind
imitation, and emphasized the need for preserving much of permanent value in the tradi¬
tional culture of the country. In an article written in 1883, on the occasion of the opening
of the National Fund, he foreshadows, at the age of twenty-two, his later outlook on the
political work of the country. He protested against political agitation being made the sole
object of the proposed fund ; he felt that the only aim of such agitation was to influence an
alien government and had no real connexion with the welfare of the country. This policy

*I have given everywhere a literal English translation of the original Bengali titles. The dates
also refer to the Bengali writings unless otherwise mentioned.

299

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

of ‘begging favours from the white masters’ could only foster an infantile mentality of
irresponsible criticism and a spirit of parasitic dependence on others. He distrusted rights
which could be conferred or withdrawn at the sweet pleasure of the rulers. He realized
that the use of English as the sole language of political work effectirally isolated such work
from the people ; he urged that a vigorous attempt be made to awaken the mind of the
masses by spreading education, and to create a spirit of self-reliance by initiating welfare
work by our own efforts. The patriotic songs of this period are inspired by the same spirit
of independence ; in one the Poet implored his countrymen to throw away 'the salver of
petitions and memorials.’

The appeal of a wider humanism was not lacking in the writings of this period. At
the age of twenty, Rabindranath made an angry protest against the forcing of opium on
the Chinese in an article. The Traffic of Death in China (1881). In another essay he said :
The call of humanity is ever sounding. Have we nothing of permanent value to contribute
to the future of human civilization? He pointed out that true freedom consists in
subordinating selfish interests to the universal spirit of humanity, while isolation, even in
independence, was bondage. In the Soitg of Invitation (1885) he called upon Bengal to
take her place in the world of humanity. At the same time he made clear his dislike of
a nebulous cosmopolitanism. In an essay on A Plot of Land (1884), he said : The universe
is present in each and every small holding. To be able to know truly even a small plot of
land is the only way of realizing the Universe. In an essay on Ram Mohun Roy (1884),
he pointed out that the significance of a people lay in the individuality of its contribution
to sum of human culture.

Ill

In 1891, Rabindranath took charge of the Tagore estates in North Bengal and went to
Shileida, where he stayed for several years. He came into intimate contact with ‘the poor,
patient, submissive, family-loving, home-clinging, eternally exploited ryots of Bengal,’
and gained a deep insight into their everyday life and needs. His passionate preoccupation
in village welfare work which is such a marked feature of his latterday activities may be
said to be a direct resultant of his stay among the peasants. He wrote at this time:

I feel a great tenderness for the peasant folk—our ryots—big, helpless, infantile children of
providence. I know not whether the socialistic ideal of a more equal distribution of wealth is
attainable, but, if not, then such dispensation of Providence is indeed cruel, and man a truly
unfortunate creature. For, if in this world misery must exist, so be it; but let some little loop¬
hole, some glimpses of possibility, at least, be left, which may serve to urge the nobler portion
of humanity to hope and struggle unceasingly for its alleviation. ... If there be any under¬
current along which the souls- of men may have communication with one another then my sincere
blessing will surely reach and serve them.

The relation between the rulers and the people increasingly engaged his attention at
this time. In an essay on Englishmen and Indians (1893) he pointed out the lack of human
touch in the British administration of India. The British rule was terribly efficient, but was
purely mechanical and thoroughly impersonal. The rulers need never come into any
personal contact with the people ; they might help or hinder their aspiration but only from

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

a disdainful distance. And what might be a matter of mere policy to the rulers might
pierce into the very core of life, might threaten the whole future of the governed but never
touch the chord of humanity. This was his greatest condemnation of British rule in India.

In a large number of short notes and comments (1893-98) he showed how this
mechanical administration was creating in the bureaucracy a mentality which looked upon
the subject people as less than human, in dealings with whom the human code of honour
and morality could be abrogated. It weakened the moral sense of the white man, and
debased the humanity of the rulers as well as that of the governed. Ini Remedy to Insults
and in Digestion of Whipping (1896) he suggested that the best interests of both Englishmen
and Indians demanded that the former should be taught the lesson that the latter could not
be insulted with impunity. The lynching of Negroes in the United States, the pogrom
against Jews in Russia, or the atrocities in Belgian Congo did not escape his attention and
called forth forcible protests (1898).

At the samd time, he grew more and more dissatisfied with the activities of politicians
which had protests as their sole aim, and proposed that the Indian National Congress, instead
of passing resolutions for the benefit of Government, should take up a definite programme
of constructive work in the country. The problem of education thus began to loom large
in his mind. In The Tortuosities of Education (1892) he vigorously advocated making
Bengali the medium of instruction and emphasized the need for making education fit in
with the life of the people.

Amidst the growing perplexities of social, educational, and political problems, his mind
.slowly turned to the past in an endeavour to discover in the history of India a central ideal
for regulating our life and work. In 1895 we find a small group of poems ; Brahman (in
Chitra), To Civilization, Forests, Forest-homes, Ancient India (all in Chaitdli) in which
tlie mind of the poet was evidently captivated by the Message of the Forest:

The forest, unlike the desert or rock or sea, is living; it gives shelter and nourishment of life.
In such surroundings the ancient forest-dwellers of India realized the spirit of harmony with the
universe and emphasized in their minds the monistic aspects of truth. They sought the realiza¬
tion of their soul through union with all.

Shortly after this we have a series of studies in which Rabindranath emphasized that
the history of India had not merely been one of the rise and fall of kingdoms, of fights for
political supremacy. The history of our people was that of our social life and the pursuit
of spiritual ideals.

The Nation is the organized self-interest of a people where it is least human and least spiritual.
The spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and in the centre of Western nationalism; its
basis is not in social co-operation. It has evolved a perfect organization of power, but not of
spiritual idealism.

He contrasted the political civilization of the West which is based on exclusiveness
with the social civilization of India which is based on human relationship and co-operation.

He rejected the cult of nationalism very decisively, and in a series of essays and
sermons (1898-1902) expounded the ideals of the social civilization which he considered to
be the most valuable contribution of India. It was the peculiar gift of India to invest even

301

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

utilitarian relations with human value. The ideal of Indian civilization was the unitary-
society which was maintained through the social regulation of differences on one hand, and
the spiritual recognition of unity on the other. Rabindranath rejoiced in the fact that
when Asoka was the Kmperor of India, he sent messengers of peace and universal love,
instead of conquering armies, to the different countries of the world. The Poet found the
truth of India in the spiritual message of the Upanishads and of the Buddha.

The Naivedya poems of this period (1900-01) are permeated by an austere spiritual
idealism. At the close of the 19th century, just before the outbreak of the South African
War, he wrote with almost prophetic vision:

The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West
and the whirlwind of hatred.

The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed,

is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance.

He knew that this was not the way of India:

Keep watch, India.

Be, not ashamed, my brothers to stand before the proud and the powerful.

Let your crown be of humility, your freedom the freedom of the soul.

And know that what is huge is not great, and pride is not everlasting.

Rabindranath reminded his countrymen again and again:

With the help of unrighteousness men do prosper.

With the help of unrighteousness men do gain victories over their enemies.

With the help of unrighteousness men do attain what they desire.

But they perish at the root.

In order to give concrete form to his ideas he left Shileida and started the Brahnta-
Vidyalaya (as the school used to be called at that time) at Santiniketan in December, 1901,
on the model of the forest-hermitages of ancient India. Rabindranath sent his invitation
in the name of the One who was Sdntam, Sivam, Advaitam:

The Peaceful, in the heart of all conflicts; the Good, who is revealed through all losses and

sufferings; the One, in all diversities of creation.

In 1904 the Swadeshi movement broke in tumult all over Bengal. To Rabindranath it
came as a splendid opportunity for initiating a great movement for constructive work of
which he had been dreaming so long: We must look after our own interests, carry out
our own work, earn our own welfare, do everything ourselves.

Of our impoverished and helpless villages he said; It will not do merely to remove
wants ; you can never remove them completely ; the far greater thing is to rouse the will
of the people to remove their own wants.

He gave a complete scheme of constructive work in the presidential address to the
Provincial Congress at Pabna (1907), and suggested that our young men should form them¬
selves into bands of workers who would go round the villages ; give a new orientation to
the village fairs {melds), bring together Hindus and Muslims in fruitful work ; confer
with and help the villagers in starting schools, making roads, supplying drinking water and

302

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

the like ; devise other ways and means in regard to all matters of general interest. In his
address to the students (1905) he said:

The down-trodden and the despised who have become callous to insults and oblivious of even the
rights of their humanity must be taught the meaning of the word brother. Teach them to be
strong and to protect themselves; for that is the only way. Take, each of you, charge of some
village and organize it. Educate the villagers and show them how to put forward their united
strength. Look not for fame or praise in this undertaking. Do not expect even the gratitude of
those for whom you would give your life, but be prepared rather for their opposition.

His sympathy for the lowly and the despised has also found expression in his poems,
for example, in the Gitanjali in 'My unfortunate land, you must comet down in humiliation
to the level of those whom you have despised/

Rabindranath threw himself heart and soul into the agitation against the Partition of
Bengal. He gave lectures, wrote articles, composed a large number of songs such as 'My
Golden Bengal,' 'From the heart of Bengal, you have arisen in your glory, my Mother’
whose central theme was Bengal and which created a patriotic fervour never known before.
He spread the use of the hand-loom, experimented with the charka, and actively
participated in the organization of co-operative societies and cottage industries. It is
interesting to note that in Leader of the Country (1905), he proposed that a single individual
should be invested with full powers of leadership. In his opinion such a step would
consolidate the discipline of the people in a personal allegiance to an individual man.

In his writings of this time he made it clear that he considered it a moral duty to fight
evil. In fact, although he has no faith in force or violence, he has never given non-violence
the status of a cult.. His position in this respect is more akin to that of the Gita. P'or
example, in an article written in 1903, he thought it right, under certain circumstances, to
have recourse to force, provided this could he done without hatred or anger.

Throughout the Swadeshi movement his mind remained essentially creative and
positive. In one of his letters we find :

I remember the day, during the Swedeshi movement in Bengal, when a crowd of young students
came to see me, and said that if I would ask them to leave their schools and colleges, they would
instantly obey. I was emphatic in my refusal to do so, and they went away angry, doubting the
sincerity of my love for my country.

This incident took place in the midst of his activities in connexion with the Bengal
National Council of Education, which had been set up as an independent organization in
opposition to the University of Calcutta. He was one of its founders, and he worked hard
in its cause, made plans, raised money, gave courses of lectures to the students, but was not
prepared to support a merely destructive boycott of the official university.

Politics was always a secondary thing with him. His views on the function of the
Congress are significant. He said that even if all the political aims of the Congress failed
completely, the Congress would still serve a most useful purpose if it succeeded in bringing
the different provinces of India into closer personal contact. At the height of the Swadeshi
movement hei declared- that the ultimate object of political work was to mould the mind of
the people into one.

303

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

In the midst of his activities, as the excitement and the heat of the movement increased,
Rabindranath suddenly retired to Santiniketan. The Hindu-Mahomedan problem and the
clash of varying interests in India continued, however, to trouble his mind. In his novel
Gora (1907-09) he laid more and more emphasis on the unifying" principle which manifested
itself throughout the whole course of the history of India:

To India has been given her problem from the beginning of history—it is the race problem. Races
ethnologically different have in this country come into close contact. This fact has been and still
continues to be the most important one in our history. It is our mission to face it and prove our
humanity by dealing with iti in fullest truth. We have to recognize that the history of India does
not belong to one particular race but to a process of creation to which the various races of the
world contributed—the Dravidians and the Aryans, the ancient Greeks and the Persians, the
Mahomedans of the West and those of Central Asia.

Just at this time violence made its first appearance in Indian politics. In an important
essay on The Way and its Fare (1908), Rabindranath tried to stem the impatience which
sought quick results through violence. He opposed recourse to violence, not by an appeal
to an abstract moral maxim, but on the ground that it violated the truth and ultimate
purpose of the history of India.

In the same essay he insisted upon the need for toleration in the face of opposition,
and advised the lifting of the ban on British goods on the ground that the boycott movement
was accentuating Hindu-Mahomeden differences and was encouraging race hatred. He
described the conflict of ideals of this period at a later date in the novel The Home and
the World (1915-16).

In East and West (1908) he said: In India, the history of humanity is seeking to
achieve a definite synthesis. The history of India is not the history of Aryans or non-
Aryans ; it is not the history of the Hindus, nor that of only Hindus and Musalmans taken
together. Pie declared:

Now at last has come the turn of the English to become true to this history and bring to it the
tribute of their life, and we neither have the right nor the power to exclude this people from
the building of the destiny of India.

His vision of the meeting of humanity in India was now complete. It found magni¬
ficent expression in two Gitanjali poems (1910) begining with, 'I see before my eyes the
rolling clouds of humanity,’ and ’On the sacred shores of the ocean of humanity of this
India, Awake my heart.’

The award of the Nobel prize in 1913 gave him the opportunity of establishing personal
contacts with the different countries of the world. During the Great War he joined the
intellectuals of the world in issuing a Manifesto against war. In 1916 he toured in Japan
and America, and delivered the well-known lectures on 'Nationalism’ which contain his
indictment of the modern Nations which had become organized as machinery of rapine and
destruction. The contrast between the aggressive spirit of the modern West and the
peaceful ideals of the ancient East became increasingly vivid. When he returned to his
own country his thoughts naturally turned to the heritage of ancient India. He felt the
need for an institution which would be a true centre of human culture.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

In 1918 in his lectures on ‘The Centre of Indian Culture" he faced the two stupendous
problems of India: the poverty of intellectual life and the poverty of material life. He
proposed to start an institution which would be a centre of Indian learning for the co¬
ordinated study of the philosophy and literature, art and music of the various cultural
streams of India: the Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, the Jaina, the Islamic, the Sikh,
and the Zoroastrian ; to which would be gradually added the Chinese, the Tibetan and the
Japanese. This institution would also be a centre of the economic life of India.

It must cultivate land, breed cattle, feed itself and its students; it must produce all necessaries,
devising the best means and using the best materials, calling science to its aid. Such an institu¬
tion must group round it all the neighbouring villages, and vitally unite them with itself in all
its economic endeavours.

The Poet coined the word ‘Visva-bharati’ at this time ViSva in Sanskrit means the
world in its universal aspect ; Bhdrati is wisdom and culture.* The Visva-bharati was to
be the centre of learning for the whole world. Appropriately enough the following
Sanskrit text was selected as the motto of the Visva-bharati:

Yatra Vi^vam bhavaty eka-nidam :

‘Where the whole world forms its one single nest."

Since the days of the Swadeshi movement Rabindranath had kept himself aloof from
political activities, devoting his energies to his institution at Santiniketam. In 1919, the
Jalianwalla Bagh incident, however, brought him into a momentary contact with the
political life of the country. He renounced his knighthood, “taking all consequences upon
himself in giving voice to the protest of millions of his countrymen, surprised into a dumb
anguish of terror.” It was a protest recorded in the name of humanity, not in the hope of
gaining concessions or to make political capital out of it. This was made clear by his
emphatic refusal to support the movement for erecting a memorial at Jaliwanwalla Bagh.

After the end of the Great War, Rabindranath undertook a long tour in 1920-21 in
Europe and the United States. He spoke everywhere on the need of the meeting of East
and West in a common fellowship of learning and a common spiritual striving for the unity
of the human races.

Western science was destined, through the mastery of the laws of nature, to liberate
man from the bondage of matter. This was not all. Rabindranath was convinced that
the West owed its greatness not only to its marvellous training of intellect and its readiness
to suffer martyrdom for the cause of justice and truth but to its spirit of service devoted to
the welfare of man. In his appeal to the peoples of the West, he said:

The world to-day is offered to the West. She will destroy it, if she does not use it for a great
creation of man. The materials for such a creation are in the hands of science; but the creative
genius is in Man’s spiritual ideal.

*There is an allusion to India (BhSrata) in the word Bkarati, which thus also represents the Spirit
of India.

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

When he returned to India in 1921, the non-co-operation movement was at its highest.
Although great pressure was put upon him from all sides, he* steadfastly refused to join it.
He was unable to accept the claim of a spiritual movement made in its behalf.

He could never agree to isolating India from the stream of world thought and progress.
In the midst of an unprecedented political unrest and excitement, and against the whole
force of the current of popular sentiment, he expounded his own views vdth great courage
in two lectures. The Call of Truth and The Meeting of Cultures (1921). He said:

It is a fact of unique importance in the history of the world to-day, that the human races have
come together as they have never done before. . . . The mentality of the world has to be changed
in order to meet the new environment of the modern age. Just as, hitherto, the collective egoism
of the Nation has been cultivated in our schools, and has given rise to a nationalism which is
vainglorious and exclusive, even so will it be necessary now to establish a new education on the
basis not of nationalism, but of a wider relationship of humanity.

It has been said in our scriptures : ‘atithi devo bhava/ asking us to realize that the Divine comes
to us as our guest, claiming our homage. All that is great and true in humanity is ever waiting
at our gate to be invited. It is not for us to question it about the country to which it belongs,
but to receive it in our home and bring before it the best we have.

Our wealth is truly proved by our ability to give, and Visva-bharati is to prove this on behalf of
India. Our mission is to show that we have a place in the heart of the great world; that we fully
acknowledge our obligation of offering it our hospitality.

Rabindranath founded the Visva-bharati in December, 1921, and proclaimed that
Visva-bharati was India’s invitation to the w'orld, her offer of sacrifice to the highest truth
of man.

Since then he has carried the message of the Visva-bharati far and wide. In 1924 he
visited China. In his address to his hosts, he reminded them of those days when India
sent her messengers of peace and universal love who found their unity of heart with the
people of China. The Poet hoped that the old relationship was still there, hidden in the
heart of the people of the East, and his visit would reopen the channel of communication.
Asia must seek strength in union, but not in competition with the West in selfishness or
brutality.

In the autumn of the same year he went to South America at the invitation of Peru on
the occasion of the Centenary of its independence, and visited Italy on his way back.

The growing strength of the cult of power with its increasing tendency towards the
mechanization of institutions and the repression of personality stirred the Poet deeply. He
gave voice to his protest in a number of lectures and essays, and also indirectly in two
dramas of this period. Waterfall (1922) and Red Oleanders (il924).

The possibilities of acquiring money has increased tremendously in modern times.
Production has assumed gigantic dimensions. This has led to an enormous number of
men being used merely as material ; so that human relationships have become utilitarian
and men have been deprived of a large part of their humanity. Modern society has lost
its integrity ; its different sections have become detached and resolved into their elemental
character of forces. Eabour is a’ force ; so also is Capital ; so are the Government and the

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

People. The repressed personality of man is smouldering in the subconscious mind of the
community, and has created a dangerous situation. Faced with the possibility of a disaster,
the great Powers of the West are seeking for peace by concentrating their forces for mutual
security. The Poet) warned them, however, that the conflict of selflsh interests was bound
to grow more and more acute so long as their league was based on the desire for consolidat¬
ing past injustice and putting off the reparation of wrongs.

Rabindranath does not believe in systems or organizations. All systems produce evil,
sooner or later, when the psychology which is at the root of them goes wrong:

Therefore I do not put my faith in any new institution, but in the individuals all over the world
who think clearly, feel nobly, and act rightly, thus becoming the channels of moral truth.

In 1926 he again went to Europe and received a great welcome in Italy as an honoured
guest. He was favourably impressed by the material prosperity of the country, but inspite
of his delicate position in having accepted her hospitality, he was unable to accord his
approval to a political ideal which had declared its loyalty to brute force as the motive
power of civilization. He made an extensive tour in the contries of Western and Central
Europe, and visited the Balkan States, Turkey and Egypt. In The Rule of the Giant
(1926), one of the lectures delivered during this tour, he described the suppression of the
human personality as the parent ill of the present age. He admitted the need for having
organizations. These help to simplify the application of energy for attaining our purpose.
They are our tools. But if this fact is forgotten, and huge and hungry organizations are
allowed to overwhelm the individual man, then the life stuff of humanity will be eaten up.
Tlie only remedy was to restore the value of personality in human civilization.

I believe in life, only when it is progressive; and in progress, only when it is in harmony with
life. I preach the freedom of man from the servitude of the fetish of hugeness, the non-human.
I refuse to be styled an enemy of enlightenment, because I do stand on the side of Jack the human,
who defies the big, the gross, and wins victory at the end.

In 1927 Rabindranath visited the Malay States, Java, Bali, and Siam, and revived the
ancient bond of India with these countries, v«^hich at one time were culturally integral parts
of India. In 1929 he attended the Triennial Conference of the National Council of Educa¬
tion of Canada. He was the outstanding figure at the Conference, and he roused a wonder¬
ful enthusiasm wherever he w'ent. The welcome given to him gradually became not only
a personal homage to his greatness but also a testimony of good will from Canada to India
itself. On his way home to India from Canada, he visited Indo-China. In 1930, in his
seventieth year, he again undertook an extensive tour in the West, visiting England,
France, Germany, Denmark, Russia and the United States.

The visit to Russia created a deep impression on his mind, and his Letters from
Russia (1930-31) give a remarkable picture of the Soviet experiments in State Socialism.
Oil the eve of his departure from Moscow he said:

I wish to let you know how deeply I have been impressed by the amazing intensity of your energy
in spreading education among the masses, I appreciate it all the more keenly because I belong
to that country where millions of my fellow countrymen are denied the light that education can
bring them. You have recognized the truth that in extirpating all social evils one has to go to
the root, which can only be done through education.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

But he remained a convinced individualist. Freedom of mind was essential for the
reception of truth. Creative activity would cease in a world rendered completely sterile by
a mechanical regularity of opinions. In his farewell message he told his hosts:

I must ask you : Are you doing your ideal a service by arousing in the minds of those under
your training, anger, class hatred and revengefulness against those not sharing your views ? You
are working in a great cause. Therefore you must be great in your mind, great in your mercy,
your understanding, and your patience.

VII

The humanism of Rabindranath Tagore has its deeper source of inspiration in his
Religion of Man which is the highest expression of his own spiritual experience.

The universe has significance only in terms of human values. Beauty has no existence
apart from the appreciation of man. All values have their orgin in the mind of man.
Even the truth of science is reached through the process of observation and reasoning
which is human ; its value as truth being a creation of the human mind. Science can only
deal with such facts as man can know and understand, and the Absolute which is beyond
the intellect of man can never be the subject matter of scientific investigations. The nature
of the universe does not, however, depend upon the comprehension of the individual person.
There exists a universal mind of humanity which transcends separate individual minds,
and has an integrity of its own which is something more than the sum of its components.
It endures beyond the life of the individual person. It is super-individual, it is the Universal
Mind. The truth of science receives its validity by reference to the standards of judgement
of this Universal Mind. Truth thus has its existence in the Universal Mind, and is indepen¬
dent of the comprehension of the peculiariaties of individual minds which are limited in
space and time.

It is not merely a reasoning mind. It is also the ultimate ground of all other values.
It is the Supreme Personality; “The God of this human universe whose mind we share
in all true knowledge, love and service.”

It is the Eternal Person manifested in all persons. It may be only one aspect of
Brahman, the One in which is comprehended Man and the Human Universe. But this is
the only aspect in which he can reveal himself to human beings.

He is the infinite ideal of Man, towards whom men move in their collective growth, with whom
they seek their union of love as individuals, in whom they find their ideal of father, friend, and
beloved.

For Rabindranath this is not an abstract philosophical system; it is a matter of direct
spiritual realization. In his Hibbert Lectures (il930-31) he has described his first
experiences when he was working in the Tagore estates:

On that morning in the village the facts of my life suddenly appeared to me in a luminous unity
of truth. I felt sure that some Being who comprehended me and my world was seeking his best
expression in all my experiences. To this Being I was responsible; for the creation in me is his
as well as mine. I felt that I had found my religion at last, the Religion of Man, in which the
infinite became defined in humanity and came close to me so as to need my love and' co-operation.

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

This idea found expression in the group of poems addressed to jivan devata, the Tord
of Life. ‘The idea of the humanity of our God, or the divinity of Man the Eternal’ was the
one theme which unfolded itself through all his religious experiences. Speaking of the
time of starting the Santiniketan school, he said:

I am sure that it was this idea of the divine Humanity unconsciously working in my mind,
which compelled me to come out of the seclusion of my literary career and take my part in the
world of practical activities.

The meeting of humanity now receives a new significance. It is the acknowledgment
of the spiritual kinship of man which is universal. Rabindranath has said:

So long men had been cultivating, almost with religious fervour, that mentality which is the jiro-
duct of racial isolation; poets proclaimed, in a loud pitch of bragging, the exploits of their popular
fighters; money-makers felt neither pity nor shame in the unscrupulous dexterity of their pocket¬
picking ; diplomats scattered lies in order to reap concessions from the devastated future of their
own victims. Suddenly the walls that separated the different races are seen to have given way,
and we find ourselves face to face.

And thus to all men :

The God of humanity has arrived at the gates of the ruined temple of the tribe. Though he has
not yet found his altar, I ask the men of simple faith, wherever they may be in the w'orld, to
bring their offering of sacrifice to him. I ask them to claim the right of manhood to be friends
of men.

I ask once again, let us, the dreamers of the East and the West, keep our faith firm in the Life
that creates and not in the Machine that constructs.

ya eko' varno bakudha sakti-yogdt
varndn anekdn nihitartho dadhati :
vicditi cdnte vUvam dddu sa devah,
sa no buddhyd iubhayd sarhyiMaktu :

He who is One, and who dispenses the inherent needs of all peoples and all times, who is in the
beginning and the end of all things, may He unite us with the bond of truth, of common fellow¬
ship, of righteousness.

CAI.CUTT.t

PRASANTA CHANDRA MAHAEANOBIS

INTUITION AND INTELLECT

I N this short paper it is my intention to indicate, rather dogmatically, my agreement with
the view on which Rabindranath Tagore has frequently insisted, that there is greater
emphasis in Western thought on critical intelligence and in the Eastern on creative
intuition.

EASTERN EMPHASIS ON CREATIVE INTUITION

The alleged dialogue between Socrates and the Indian philosopher suggests that for the
whole w’estern tradition man is essentially a rational being, one who can think logically and
act in a utilitarian manner. The western mind lays great stress on science, logic and
humanism. Hindu thinkers as a class hold with great conviction that we possess a power
more interior than intellect by which we become aware of the real in its intimate individua¬
lity and not merely in its superficial or discernible aspects. For the Hindus a system of
philosophy is an insight, a dariana. It is the vision of truth and not a matter of logical
argument and proof. They believe that the mind can be freed by gradual training from
the influences of speculative intellect as well as past impressions and that it can unite
itself with the object whose nature is then fully manifested.* They contend that we can
control destiny by the power of truth. Knowledge means power. The lack of this
knowledge is the root of all trouble. Vidyd is nioksa: avidyd is sarhsdra. Intuitive
realisation is the means to salvation. He who knows is saved directly and immediately,
and by means of that knowledge. Intuitive insight is identical with freedom. “Whoever
knows ‘I am Brahman’ becomes this all.’’^ “He who knows that supreme Brahman
becomes that Brahman itself.’’^ We cannot know Brahman fully and truly, unless we
partake of its essence, become one with it. To know God is to become divine, free from
any outside influence likely to cause fear or sorrow. Brahman which symbolises the
absolute reality means also holy knowledge, intuitive wisdom. Intuitive wisdom becomes
personified as the first principle of the universe. He who knows it knows the essence
of the cosmos. The acceptance of the authority of the Vedas by the different systems of
Hindu thought is an admission that intuitive insight is a greater light in the abstruse
problems of philosophy than logical understanding. Sankara, for example, regards
anubhava or integral experience as the highest kind of apprehension. While it may not
be clear and distinct, it is sure and vivid. Buddha emphasises the importance of bodhi or
enlightenment. His impatience with metaphysical subtleties is well known. The
sophistries of the intellect were according to him hindrances to the higher life. Knowledge
of reality is to be won by spiritual effort. One cannot think one’s way into reality but

* VaUesika Sutra (IX. 2.13) : Different names are given to this apprehension which is not due
to the senses or inference such as prajnd, pratibhn, arsa-jndna, iiddha-dar^ana, yogi=pratyaksa ;
Jayanta’s Nydya-manjari, p. 178; Bhasa-pariccheda, 66.

2 Brhaddranyaka Vpanisad, 1.4.10 & IS.

’ Mundaka Vpanisad, III 2.9.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

only live into it. In early Buddhism prajna or intuitive insight represents the highest
activity of the human mind. The general tendency of Hindu and Buddhist thought is
to take hold of the aspiration of the human soul after a higher life, and treat this fact as
the key to the interpretation of the universe, and all critical philosophy took this into
account.

WESTERN EMPHASIS ON CRITICAE INTELLIGENCE

While the dominant feature of Eastern thought is its insistence on creative intuition,
the Western systems are generally characterised by a greater adherence to critical intelli¬
gence. This distinction is not to be pressed too closely. It is relative and not absolute.
It describes the chief tendencies and there are in fact many exceptions. It is only a
question of the distribution of emphasis.

If we may trust the Pythogorean tradition, the method and achievements of Greek
philosophy were largely affected by the example of mathematics. Socrates is credited by
Aristotle with two things, inductive arguments and universal definitions. Whatever is
real must have a definable form. Things are in virtue of their forms. The classification
of moral concepts is the first step to any improvement in practice. Suggested definitions
are tested by Socrates with reference to actual facts. For Plato, geometry was the model
science. Even God geometrises. Aristotle invented the scienee of logie. For him, man
is pre-eminently a rational animal. Eogic for the Greeks is not so mueh a science of
discovery as one of proof. The civic life of the ancient Greeks centred round the assembly
and the law courts, where intellectual subtlety and mental dexterity are most in demand.
The great aim was to secure victory in debate, and the chief means to it was to master
the technique of argument. More prominence was given to the expression and com¬
munication of thought than to its discovery and growth. There is an intimate relation
between grammar and logic in Aristotle’s Organon. The tendency to stereotype thought
in conventional ways grew up. The canons of formal logic would be of excellent use,
when all truths were discovered and nothing more remained to be known, but logic cannot
dictate or set limits to the course of nature and progress of discovery.

I have no doubt that this summary description is quite inadequate to the complexity
and richness of Greek thought. The non-mathematical side of Plato’s teaching is perhaps
his most important contribution. For Plato, noesis is the highest kind of knowledge,
and supra-intellectual. He believed in what he called dialectic or the conversation of
the soul with itself, which is not scientific knowledge. Aristotle speaks of the absolute
self-knowledge of God, a pure activity which knows no law and no end outside itself.
This is not the place to discuss the alleged influence of Eastern thought on the Orphic
mysteries and Pythagoras and through them on Plato’s philosophy. Pythagoras and
Plato may owe to Indian thought more than the Hellenists are willing to admit.'

1 The Dean of St. Paul’s traces this mode of Plato’s teaching to Asiatic thought. Professor
Muirhead commenting on Dean Inge’s Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought (1926) says :
“Beginning in Asia, this mystical faith swept over Greece and Southern Italy in the form of Orphism
and Pythagoreanism. It found an intelligent sympathiser in Socrates, and under his inspiration

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Speaking generally, however, it is not incorrect to hold that the Greeks attempted to
give an explanation of the problem of certainty in terms of logical reason and failed to
justify the logical postulates themselves.

Plotinus'* and the New-Platonists were convinced that logical knowledge alone was
inadequate. Neo-platonism, which originated in Alexandria, where Oriental modes of
thought were not unknown, presented a more organic view and grounded logical processes
on the certainty of immediate experience. But the post-scholastic philosophers fell back
upon a purely rationalistic approach to certainty and the attempt to ground philosophy
in science became more popular with the growth of natural sciences, which were actually
engaged in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge through observation and experimental
verification. Though the methodology of the sciences studied the processes by which
beliefs grew and thoughts evolved, its actual interest was more in the grammar of discovery
than the life of it. The latter by its very nature sets limits to logical exposition.

For Descartes, with whom modern European philosophy takes a new direction, truth
means clearness and distinctness. Whatever can be expressed in mathematical form is
clear and distinct. Descartes sets forth a system of universal concepts of reason, which
are derived from a consideration of certain fundamental logical and mathematical relation¬
ships. In a famous sentence, he observes, “I was especially delighted with mathematics.
I was astonished that foundations so strong and solid should have had no loftier super¬
structure raised on them.” His conception of universal mathematics and faith that all
things are mutually related, as the objects of geometry,® imply a strictly mechanical
world. For Spinoza, even Ethics should be treated by the geometrical method. For
Leibniz, again, the monads or perceiving minds differ in nothing other than the form of
perception, for each monad resembles the others as regards the content of its perception.
Each reflects the total universe from its own special angle. But the lowest monads, the
plant and the animal ones, have dim and confused mode of perception. Divine cognition
consists in completely distinct and adequate ideas. We human beings are in between.
Our ideas of sense qualities are confused, those of logic and mathematics distinct. We
attempt to transform the former into the latter kind, factual presentations into notions
conceived by reason. The accomplishment of this ideal means for Leibniz the setting
forth of a general system of the possible forms of thought and the universal laws of con¬
nection which these laws obey. Such a plan was outlined by Leibniz in his General
Characteristics, which is the foundation, in a sense, of symbolic logic, which reached
its great development in the works of Boole, and Peano, Frege and Russell.

Kant’s fundamental aim was to lead philosophy into the safe road of science, and he
inquired into the possibility of philosophy as a science with the intention of formulating

reached its highest expression in the Dialogues of Plato.” The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saccon
Philosophy (1931), p. 27.

* Plotinus accompanied Gordian’s army in order that he may have an opportunity of studying
Indian and Persian philosophy. Though Gordian’s death in Mesopotamia stopped him half way,
his enthusiasm for it is evident.

* The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Eng. Tr. by Haldane and Ross (1911), Vol. I, p. 92.

312

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

its conditions. The ‘Nature’ with which we deal in science and everyday life is due to
the work of the understanding which arranged the multiplicity of sense in an orderly
world according to a logic which Kant distinguished as synthetic from the traditional
formal or analytic logic. His successors took over this logic of synthesis and utilised it
for the purpose of resolving the imperfections of Kant’s system. The tendency in Kant
to postulate an intelligible world as the foundation of ethics is dismissed as irrelevant and
the world of things in themselves declared a poetic fiction. In Hegel, logic ceases to be
a mere theory of thought but becomes an account of reality. It is an abstract representa¬
tion of an actual process by which the absolute spirit reveals itself as the universe in the
different forms which the universe assumes to human consciousness, nature, history,
society, art and religion. “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational”^
Hegel’s view of history as the manifestation of spirit in the threefold moments of thesis,
antithesis and synthesis is an intellectual scheme which largely forced the facts into con¬
formity with an a priori formula. Hegel’s influence is continued in the later idealists.
“No fact,’’ says Edward Caird, “which is in its nature incapable of being explained or
reduced to law, can be admitted to exist in the intelligible universe.’’* For the Hegelians,
reality is essentially knowable in the logical way. While Bosanquet is more Hegelian
in hi^ outlook, Bradley is more Kantian. For Bradley, thought moves within the realm
of relationships and can never grasp or positively determine the ultimate reality. The
realists are the worshippers of logic and the scientific method. Faith in the logical intel¬
lect as the supreme instrument of knowledge has led the realistic thinkers to devote their
major energies to the precise formulation of specialised problems. The Behaviourists
insist on the close relation between thinking and talking and reduce thinking to a matter
of language or expression. In the words of Max Muller, “To think is to speak low. To
speak is to think aloud.’’

From the Socratic insistence on the concept to Russell’s mathematical logic, the
history of Western thought has been a supreme illustration of the primacy of the logical.
Rationalism is deep in our bones and we feel secure about scientific knowledge and
sceptical about religious faith. If “there is no higher faculty than those involved in
ordinary knowledge,’’ if ‘the truth of religion’ or the validity of religious experience is
to be established, “as reasonable inference from discursive knowledge about the world,
human history, the soul with its faculties and capacities, and above all from knowledge
of the inter-connection between such items of knowledge,’’® then it will be difficult for
us to be certain about God. But the tradition of religion holds that those who have known
God by acquaintance and not by hearsay, have known him not as a valid conclusion from
logical reasoning but by the constraining authority of experience.

ANDHRA UNIVERSITY, WALTAIR S. RADHAKRISHNAN

1 Hegel: The Philosophy of Right: Eng. Tr. by Dyde (1896), p. xxvii.

® Hegel: p. 141. See also Ritchie: Philosophical Studies, p. 226, Watson: The Interpretation
of Religious Experience (1912).

3 Tennant: Philosophical Theology. Vol. I (1928), Ch. XH, p. 325 ff.

MUNDARI POETRY

T here is no known people on earth so rude as to be devoid of poetry and song. The
so-called ‘savage’ has neither the innate inferiority in mental capacity which un¬
informed popular opinion associates with him, nor the ‘pre-logical’ mind which
Eevy-Briihl and some other anthropologists attribute to him. The ‘primitive’ man is as
much human as members of the most advanced communities, and, though his categories
of thought may be different, his processes of thought and reasoning are the same as ours,
and he too is moved by the same emotions as we are, and feels as often as, if not more
often than, we do, the inner urge for giving artistic expression to the surging emotions of
his soul. Poetry, like Religion, is, in fact, one of the earliest devices by which primitive
man sought temporary relief from the troubles and anxieties which beset him and the
burden of emotions that oppressed him.

The older belief in the comparatively recent evolution and brief duration of humanity
and human civilization has now been dispelled by Science. Thanks to the revolutionary
researches of Pre-historic Archgeology, w'e now know that the antiquity of civilized man
—‘man who had invented language and was a first-class artist’—cannot be measured by
centuries or even by millennia. Our comparatively primitive tribes have for countless
generations been carrying on the same interminable struggle with the forces of Nature that
the more advanced communities in more favourable environments have waged with better
success. As a result of this age-long struggle with Nature, the so-called ‘primitive’ tribes,
too, have succeeded in working out a form of civilization of their own, which though
inferior in refinement and complexity to those of the more advanced communities, is not
different in essence. The character and pattern of each civilization, its outlook on life, its
fundamental beliefs and categories of thought, are determined by its particular environ¬
ment and history, and are faithfully reflected in its Poetry as in its Religion.

In this paper, it will be out of place to enter into a discussion of the origin and develop¬
ment of the poetic art and its manifestations at different levels of culture.

I shall here content myself with briefly noting the salient characteristics of primitive
poetry as revealed in the songs of one of our principal aboriginal hill-tribes,—the pre-Aryan
and pre-Dravidian Mundas of Chota-Nagpur. The comparatively peaceful life of agricul¬
turists with its intervals of leisure has enabled the Mundas to build up a poetic technique
of their own, which serves to give outer expression, however halting and imperfect, to their
inner emotions.

The primitive Mupda seeks to make up for the deficiencies of his language by various
simple expedients of which the following are the most marked: Repetition of the same
concept in synonymous or almost synonymous words and expressions in successive lines
or stanzas so as to present a vivid and complete picture of the object or idea sought to be
portrayed ; the employment of quaint circumlocutions and concrete words to express abstract

314

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

ideas for whicli he has nq words in his language ; the employment of terms ext>ressivei of
individual and concrete objects to express generic or collective and class names for which
he has few terms in his native vocabulary ; the use obsolete or foreign (Hindi) words to
add force and emphasis to synonymous words in his own longue ; the employment of
parallels and contrasts, synonyms and antonyms, metaphors and allegories to add vividness
and emphasis to an idea or picture ; the reduplication of words or syllables and the use of
onomatopoetici words and jingles and sonorous compound-words, the lengthening of vowel-
sounds for the sake of euphony or emphasis ; the infixing of short vowels in the middle of
words and suffixing of such vowels at the end of words for the sake of melody ; the use of
an initial liquid n-sound before words beginning with a vowel, and the omission of an
aspirate h at the beginning of a word, to secure a smooth flowing sound.

As Munda poems are mostly songs meant to be sung and not recited, the beauty of
rhymes does not appear to have particularly impressed the Mupda poet. Such rhymes
as occur here and there in Munda poetry are more accidental than deliberate ; the same
or similar grammatical suffixes {land, kdnd, etc.) would account for most of them.

Although the Mupd^ poet appears to appreciate the beauty of symmetry and proportion
and the desirability of having a uniform number of syllables in each line of a poem or
song, he more often fails than succeeds in securing such uniformity. The length of the
line, however, is sought to be accommodated to the length of the melody by the repetition
of words or syllables, by the insertion of expletives such as go, ogo, ho, do, he, re, ge, and
by the addition of terms of endearment like dddd, mdi, miru, maind, besides the lengthen¬
ing of vowel-sounds and the infixing and suffixing of redundant vowels to which I have
already referred.

With devices like these, the humble Mupda singer manages to give in such rhythmical
language as his own ideas of harmony dictate and the resources of his speech permit, con¬
crete artistic expression to the emotional reactions produced in his mind by the stimuli of
the outer world around him.

Deficiencies in the rhythmic flow of words in his songs the Mupda singer further seeks
to eke out in part by the rhythmic movements of his feet in dance,—for the bulk of the
Munda’s poetic productions is in the form of songs meant to accompany his seasonal dances.
In fact, there are reasons to believe that rhythm and metre in poetry, the varying cadences
of sound in song and the regular intervals of time represented by the line, the half-line,
the couplet and the stanza in poetry, originally reflected the varying steps of the dance ;
that dance and song, if not related to each other as elder and younger sisters, are, at any
rate, the twin-daughters of Emotion. And instrumental Music was devised quite early as
a helpful handmaid.

Munda youths of both sexes sing these dancing songs together, the young men playing
upon musical instruments and standing a little apart from the girls. The young men begin
a song, and when they have sung a distich the girls take it up and repeat it or the last lines
of it in chorus with generally slight variations towards the end, and dance to the tune of
the song.

315

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Although the bulk of Muijdari songs, are, as I have stated, meant to be sung at the
seasonal dances, it may be noted, however, that there are some songs which may not be
accompanied by dance. Some such are specially sung at weddings with or without dances,
a few are composed by magicians and sung, unaccompanied by dances, at their incantations
and seances, a few are sung by children at certain singing games, and a fewer still are
narrative songs inserted in some of their folk-stories known as ‘Durang-kahani’ or ‘song-
stories.’

However halting and imperfect, in many respects, the manner of his poetic expression
may be, the matter of the Murida’s poetry is mostly concerned with some of those elemental
and permanent affections common to humanity. The joys and sorrows of youthful love
are portrayed by the Munda poet with sincerity and depth of feeling in a large number of
songs. The affections and anxieties of parents for their children, and the anguish of
bereavement through death are expressed in a few songs of simple pathos. The hilarious
enjoyment of work in his fields, the joyful anticipation of a good harvest, the keen excite¬
ment and gusto of hunting and war, the exhilarating pleasures of dancing and singing,
music and merry-making, the pleasurable excitement of youth in attending a periodical fair
or festival,—all these find vivid expression in many a Muridari song.

In a considerable number of dainty little songs, the Muti^a poet expresses his joyous
appreciation of the beauty of natural objects in his fields and groves, hills and valleys,
streams and woods. A lovely landscape, the green and yellow crops waving in the breeze,
the lovely flowers of various forms and hues in jungle and grove, the silvery white fishes
sparkling in the sun as they glide in wavy movements in the limpid waters of his
native hill-streams or ensconce themselves in their silvery sand-beds, the pretty birds
of his fields and woods, bushes and briars, hopping about and chirping, and singing
in joyful or plaintive notes, around him and above him, the manifold sights and sounds
of the inanimate and animate worlds that surround him,—these feed his imagination
and gladden his heart or move him to tenderness and sympathy. And he is stimulated to
artistic creation of beauty in song.

Nor is he altogether insensible to the sublimer aspects of Nature. The violent summer
storms that sometimes tear down the giant trees of his forests and despoil the birds of their
nests and men of their huts, the sudden floods of his narrow native hill-streams that carry
away man and beast and tree in their mad vehemence, the dangers from venomous serpents
and beasts of prey that lurk in hill and forest,—these make a deep impression on his mind
and form the themes of some of his songs.

Some of his songs, again, though not directly didactical, indirectly tend to emphasise
the customary moral code of the tribe. These either hold up to ridicule or brand with
infamy or depict in lurid colours the unenviable fate of rebels against time-honoured tribal
regulations in matters regarded by the tribe as of vital moment to society, such as restric¬
tions relating to love and marriage, touch-taboos and food-taboos, and the like.

Lastly, in a few of his songs the Munda poet rises to the dignity of a primitive philo-

316

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

sopher. And we hear the Mui;ida singer bewailing the decay of youth and beauty, the
uncertainty of life, and the impermanence of earthly pleasures.

Owing to the limited space accorded to a contributor to this volume, I regret I cannot
in this paper give illustrations of the various characteristics of Mundari poetry noted above.
I shall content myself with merely citing two or three examples of the Munda’s love-songs.

In the following simple song, the Mu^da singer expresses the anguish of a lover at the
absence of his sweet-heart, his ardent longing for her return, and his joy at reunion.

Youth : Hijume re, gating, monlaing do gdso jdn.

Ho re gating, chiuldre gating nelpidpne ?

H dr aging neld, ptfiging arida.

Ho re gating, chiuldre gating nelrudrme?

Hijulendng, gating, montding do sukujdnd
Ho re gating chiuldre, gating, kding bdgimd.

Hordging neld piriging dridd

“Ho re, gating, chiuldre, gdting, nelrudj-me'}’"

Maiden : Harare bdgribd bdkfire chdmpd bdhd

Champa bdhdre gdting gictu tukdingme.

Hordgingo neld pifigiugo dridd,

“Ho re gdting, chiuldre gdting, nelfuarme ?”

[rra>i5iation]

Youth : Come, my love, to my heart withered like a dried-up flower,

O, my beloved, when shall I find thee again ?

I have been watching [longingly] the road, I have been watching

[fondly] the fields [for thee] :
Alas, my dear, when shall I find thee again ?

Now that thou art back, my love, my heart is glad ;

Never again, my love, shall I suffer thee to leave me ;

I have kept watching the roads, I have watched the fields,

[Saying—] “O sweet, when shall I find thee again?”

Maiden : There blooms on the road the gulaichi, in the garden the chdmpd ;

With chdmpd flowers, my love, do thou weave a wreath for me.

I, too, have watched the roads, I have watched [fondly] the fields,
[Saying—] “O, my love, when shall I find thee again?”

317

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

In the following song the Mu^ida lover expresses his yearning to meet the maiden of
his choice, and his fruitless search from field to field for her : —

Mode piri lelemere gating.

Kdm leld lelod gdting!

BdrepiTt chindtnere, sdngding,

Kdm chindo chindo!

Hundi-bd-ing gutuledd, gdting,

Kdm lelo lelod, gdting,

Bdkdri-bd-ing gdldng-ledd, sangaing,

Kdm chindo chindo!

Hundi-bd-ing g^utuledd, gdting,

Sutdmrege goso-jdn!

Sutdmrege goso-jdnd, gdting,

Sutdmrege goso jdn!

Bdkdfi-bd-ing gdlangledd, sdngding,

Chdrirege goso jdnd!

Chdrireing gdldng ledd, sdngding,

Chdrirege maild jdnd!

Hiaiinge moningd, re gating,

Chdkdtinge moningd!

Sutdmrege gosojdnd, gdting,

Chdrirege rnaildjdnd!

[Translation]

In one field I looked [for thee], my dear,

[But] I did not—did not—meet thee, dear !

A second field I searched [for thee], my love,

[There, too] I did not—did not—find thee.

With /lundt-flowers, garlands [for thee] I wove, my dear,

[But] did not meet thee—meet thee, dear,

Bdkdfi-Howers I wove into garlands, my love,

[But] did not find thee—find thee.

The hundi-Qo'wers that I wove into wreaths, my dear.

On their threads, did they shrivel up.

They dried up on their threads, my dear.

They shrivelled up on their reeds.

318

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

On the reeds on which I strung them, love,

On those same reeds, did they wither.

My heart was sore, my dear,

Full heavy was my heart.

On their threads, the flowers faded, my dear.

On their reeds, did they wither.

In connection with Munda love songs, it is worth noting that although there are very
few Mundas who have any hnowledge of the Hindu legends of Radha and Krishna, or indeed
have any idea that they belong to Hindu mythology, the love songs of Radha-Krishna, once
sung by Vaishnava preachers among them and still sung by their Hindu neighbours must
have made a deep impression on the Hindi-knowing Munda’s mind ; and the Mundas readily
borrowed and assimilated such elements from them as appeared to fit in with their own ideal
of human love, and incorporated them with suitable modifications in Mundari love-songs.
Here is an instance of such a song, which its Munda singers regard as depicting the love of
a youth and maiden of their own tribe: —

Gflfa japd kadamb-subd, hende hende duH-tddae,

'Radha Radha' mente rutui ofong-kena, nurigdi go gupiidnd.

Jui chdmeli gutu-tdnd, ndkore tdingd gating diibd kdndf
Bd’-tadae bhdld bhdld : supiddtadde hdld hdld,

Kdinglelte med-dd jdro-tdnd
Okore tdingd gdting diibd kdnd?

Tesan med-dd jdrd-idnd, jesan gdrd-dd lingitdnd,

Ichd-bd’-re rdsi jdrotdnd,

Okore tding gdting dubakdndf

[Translation^

By river’s side, under kadamb tree, with black-bordered dhoti on
Piping the tune of ‘Radha, Radha,’ he [my beloved] tends his oxen and kine.
Wreaths of jui and chdmeli I weave ; Oh, where doth my beloved tarry ?

[For him] I have decked my hair with flowers choice and sweet,

and woven ray braids in pattern fine.
Without sight of him, tears stream down my eyes.

Oh ! where doth my sweetheart tarry ?

Tears trill down my eyes [even] as water flows down the stream,

Or as sweet juice (honey) trickles down an ichd flower,

O, where doth my beloved stay away ?

RANCHI, CHOTA NAGPUR, INDIA SARAT CHANDRA ROY

319

RABINDRANATH AND WORLDTORCES

O N the occasion of Rabindranath’s seventieth birthday it has occurred to me to read
once more some of the verses composed by him in his earlier years. Some three
and forty yearsi ago, in 1888, when he was a young man of twenty-seven, the poet
wrote Duranta ASd (Unruly Hope). The obstinate hope or rather turbulent wish of
this brilliant artistic junior is in part worded as follows:

Ucchwasiia rakta dsi Blood enthused comes in a rush

vaksa-tal pheliche grdsi, and swallows the breast full,

Prakdi-htn cintd-rdSi And swarms of thoughts unexprest

kariche hdndhdni. are moving to and fro.

Kothdo yadi chutite pdi — Oh, could I run to somewhere,

bdnciyd jdi take, how alive I would be!

Bhavyatdr gandi-mdjhe Within the bounds of fettered life

^dnti ndhi mdn{. No peace can I find.

This full-blooded quest of movements, of richness of life, of the peace of unrest with
which the poetry of young Rabi greets us, is Whitmanesque in its stir and turmoil. Here
we encounter the spirit of “Pioneers, O Pioneers !’’ in the American Leaves of Grass.
This is but a phase indeed of the Sturm und Drang, of storm and stress, in the life and art
of Young India. One is likewise easily reminded of David Singing Before Saul in Robert
Browning’s lines:

“Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock.

The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool’s living water, * * * *

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.’’

There are very few human beings, especially among poets, painters and other artists
whose thoughts have found so ample and so varied expression, and whose career, both
artistic and personal or social, has been so full of holidayings from the bhavyatdr gandi-
mdjh, from the fetters of forms formulae and systems, and punctuated with so many
excursions “to somewhere’’ as Rabindranath Tagore. Neither that great encyclopaedist
of the middle ages, the cavalier-mystic-Ghibelline-exile, the author of Divina Commedia,
nor that “pagan humanist, der gdttUche Goethe,’’ the poet-scientist-statesman, the
father of romanticism in modem literature, would appear to have experienced such fullness,
such diversity, such movements as have been lived and sung or painted by Rabindranath.

320

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Several years later, while he was running his thirtieth year, the poet published Visva-
Nrlya (iWorld-Dance). In 1892 his heart aches to find that

Samsar-srot jdhnavi-sama
bahu dure geche sariya,

E iudhu usar balukd-dhusar
maru-rupe ache mariyd.

World-currents like the river Jahnavi
have moved far far away.

This land is barren and sandy-grey
and lies like desert dead.

And what are the marks of maru-rupe ache mariyd, of lying “dead aa desert?” There
arc to be found

“No motion’s trace and no song.

No work, no inspiration.”

But what is his own heart’s desire ? Says he :

Hrday dmdr krandan kare
mdnav-hrdaye misUe,

Nikhiler sdthe mahd rdja-pathe
calite divas-nisithe.

My heart is longing and crying
to mix with human hearts.

With the world on the great highways
to travel day and night.

Nay, more. Rabi would not be content if this heart-to-heart world-intercourse, this
pilgrimage among human beings, is enjoyed by himself alone. This enrichment of life,
these “wild joys of living,” this greatening of the soul, he longs at the same time for the
people of his land too. He asks—

Jagat-mdtdno sangit-tdne
fee dibe eder ndcdye ?
Jagater prdn kardiyd pdn
fee dibe eder bdncdyef

With the world-maddening music
who is there to make them dance ?

By making them drink of the world’s life
who is there to enliven them?

Tagore here yearns after a state of things such as is in a certain measure depicted in
the following words, again, of Browning’s David:

“Oh, our manhood’s prime vigour! No spirit feels waste.

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.

How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy !”

All these longings after “great highways,” night and day travels, world-dance, and
so forth were more than a dozen years before the “event of 1905,” when Bengal and along
with Bengal the whole of India started dancing with the “world-maddening music” of
Asian unrest. To-day in 1931 it is but a bare fact of literary biography to record that
Rabi’s life and art did not cease to flow with merely declaring the “unruly hope” of

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

abandon and unrest or with simply posing the question as to who was to make his country¬
men “drink of world’s life.’’ Rabi has ever been a going concern, always on the world’s
highways, perpetually on the move.

Rabi has been on the move from the city to the village, from the plains to the hills,
from the forests to the rivulets, from the jasmine to the stars. He has been on the move
from the peasants to the princes, from the masses to the classes, from the warriors and
statesmen to the folk-minstrels, from the moderns to the mediaevals, from the past to the
present, from the Hindu to the Musalman and from them both to the Christian and the
Jew. He has been on the move from district to district, from province to province, from
continent to continent, from India to Japan and China, to Europe, to the New Hemisphere
and back again to India, from the East to the West and from the West tov the East.

The limits of conventions and the bounds of controlled life he has transcended, he
has drunk and drunk deep of the world’s living springs, the world-maddening music of
the varied races and regions he has made his own. He has danced with the Bdul singers
of Bengal, the ^fahawg-poets of the Marathas, and the Cdrans of the Rajputs. He has
danced with the street-processionists of the Swadeshi epoch, with the boys and girls of
his own Santiniketan, with the young men and women of the four quarters of the globe,
hike Nafaraja he has participated in the dance of the universe. This characteristic elan
vital has rendered the Rabindric literary and artistic creations so many moments in the
continuous expression of the dynamic spirit itself,—of the yearning to move, to break,
to grow, of the heart’s keen solicitude to experience the contacts of other hearts, of the
all-absorbing passion to cultivate the intimacy of world-forces.

I remember once again some of the lines written by Rabindranath in 1888 at the
age of twenty-seven. An important landmark of his artistic career is embodied in the
poem entitled Parityakta (Forsaken). We encounter him in the act of dedicating himself
to the motherland, in the following lines:

Ddiiddye visdl dharanir tale
ghuce gela bhay Idj,

Bujhite pdrinu e jagat mdjhe
dmdro rayeche kdj.

As I stood on the wide Earth,
disappeared all fear and shame:

I could feel that in this world
even for me there was some work.

Swadehr kdche ddnddye prabhdte
kahildm jod kare —

'Ei laha, mdtah, e cira jlvan
sonpinu tomdri tare.’

vSo I stood by my country one morn
and prayed with folded hands:
"Accept, 0 Mother, all my life,
this I consecrate to Thee.’’

This is a noble dedication of self to the Motherland.

It is to be observed, however, that with one breath Rabi’s blood was longing for
excursions into the universe, but with another it was seeking self-realization in the
country’s service. Has it been possible to construct a bridge between the country and the
universe, the home and the world, the known and the unknown, the near and the far?

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The activities, restlessnesses, travels of Rabindranath,—these world-contacts or
minglings with the world-forces, these pilgrimages among mankind known and unknown,
these experiences of shoulder-rubbings with “strange faces, other minds” have not turned
out to be the idle luxuries of a Bohemian aesthete. Asia, Europe, Africa, America, all
have realized that this restless globe-trotter from Bengal, this unruly Indian vagabond has
by his gentle pilgrim’s staff succeeded in engineering the “world-currents” back to the
land of his birth and in transporting his people into the whirlpool of the world-forces. In
regard to the emergence of the “Indian question” as an important item of international
politics, economics and culture, not the least powerful formative agency have been these
hemispheroidal “day and night travels” of this indefatigable avatar of Wanderlust.

The last quarter of a century has been one of the most momentous epochs in the
creative activities of the Indian people. As some of the loftiest and' noblest specimens of
these creations the personalityj poetry, prose and paintings of Rabindranath have coiii-
tributed enormously to the possibility of the Indian people utilizing the international forces,
political, economic and cultural, in the interest of its own expansion. Tagore, the singer
of “unruly hope,” the poet of “world-maddening dance-music,” the romantic wanderer
among human hearts, requires thus to be appraised also as an architect of the India of
“entangling alliances,” of an India which by constant association with the powers great,
medium and small, Asian and Eur-American, seeks to “drink of the world’s life” and
ac(iuire a fresh lease of existence, free and unfettered, mighty and prosperous. Not many
Indians have served their motherland as effectively and substantially as this poet of tlie
hemispheres, the artist of the world-forces.

Well has Rabindranath served his country as well as mankind. So on the occasion
of his seventieth birth festival let me offer for him my prayer in the words of Dante:

“Here kneeleth one.

Who of all spirits hath reviewed the state.

From the world’s lowest gap unto this height.

Suppliant to thee he kneels, imploring grace
For virtue yet more high, to lift his ken
Toward the bliss supreme.”

May the Mdnasa-Sundart, the Inspiration-Deity, the “Beatrice” of Rabindranath, lead
him on to “virtue yet more high,” until he possesses for himself and for us the “bliss
supreme.”

THE UNIVERSITY, CALCUTT.\

BENOY KUMAR SARKAR

SOME THOUGHTS ON AHIMSA

O NE of the foremost contributions of India to the moral progress of mankind is the
idea and ideal of Ahuhsd. It is often translated by ‘non-violence,’ but the
Indian term deserves, like Karma and Nirvana, to be added to the vocabulary
of Western languages. It is not often that the etymology of a word gives so full an
explanation of its meaning, as in the case of Ahirhsd. The verb hhhs is a desiderative
form of han, and therefore means ‘to wish to slay, to hurt, to injure, to harm,’ and the
substantive a-hirhsd means ‘not wishing to slay, to hurt, to injure, to harm.’ The
history of Ahirhsd begins with the Chandogya-Upani§ad (III, 17, 4) where the moral
conduct of man is summarized in the words: tapo ddnam drjavam ahirhsd satya-vacanani
‘austerity, alms-giving, righteousness, Ahirhsd and truthfulness.’ According to the
Yoga-sutra (II, 30) Ahirhsd is the first of the eight conditions for Yoga. In the Brahmanical
Dharma-Sastras Ahirhsd is prescribed as the first rule of a holy life for the Brahmacarin,
the Snataka, and the Sannyasin, but it also heads the list of the duties of all castes in
Manu’s law-book (X, 63). In the Mahabharata we find the story of the shopkeeper
Tuladhara and the Brahman Jajali. The latter, a great Yogin, was standing in the forest,
like a wooden post, without moving. A pair of birds came flying towards him, and built
their nest in the dishevelled hair of his head, and he did not move until the she-bird had
laid eggs in the nest on his head, the eggs were hatched and the young birds were fledged
and had flown away. After this mighty feat of asceticism he called out exultingly: ‘I
have achieved religious merit!’ But he was told by a heavenly voice that he was not
even equal to Tuladhara, an honest shopkeeper in Benares. The great Yogin is quite
disheartened, goes to Tuladhara, and enquires of him as to wherein his renowned religious
merit consists. Then Tuladhara explains to him the eternal law of Ahirhsd, which is
known as the old doctrine, beneficial to all, the doctrine of love (maitra) : ‘A manner
of life which is combined with complete harmlessness, or only with slight harm, to all
beings, that is the highest religion ; in accordance with this I live, O Jajali....If one fears
no being, and no being fears one, if one has preference for nobody and hates nobody, then
he becomes united with Brahman.”

It is, however, in Buddhism and especially in Jainism that Ahirrisd as the highest moral
law {ahirhsd paramo dharmah) is most strongly emphasized. We read in the Jaina scrip¬
tures: ‘He should not kill, not cause others to kill, not consent to the killing of others.’
‘The Arhats and Bhagavats of the past, present, and future, all say thus, speak thus,
declare thus, explain thus: no breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should ever
be slain, or treated with violence, or abused, or tormented, or harassed.’ ‘All beings
hate pain, therefore one should not kill them. This is the quintessence of wisdom :
not to kill anything.” And in Buddhist Sutras it is said : ‘As I am, so are these, as these
are, so am I ; identifying himself with others, let him not kill nor cause any one to kill.’

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Putting away the murder of that which lives, he abstains from destroying life. The
cudgel and the sword he lays aside ; and, full of modesty and pity, he is compassionate and
kind to all creatures that have life.’

From a historical point of view, Ahithsd was at first, like tapas, the virtue of the
perfect man, the ascetic, the saint, who had to practise it, in order that his soul may be
purified and prepared for final emancipation. In course of time, probably under the indirect
influence of Buddhists and Jainas, it came to be a general law of morality for all nren,
though there were always a great many ifs and buts to this ‘general’ law. The same
law-books which teach Ahimsd as the first duty of all castes, also teach the Varndhama-
Dharma, according to which it is the Ksatriya’s duty to fight and to kill ; and an ancient
Hindu law-book says that the slaughter of beasts for sacrifice ‘is no slaughter.’ The
Buddhist poet Matrceta, in his letter to the Maharaja Kaniska, implores his royal friend
to give up hunting, with the curious argument that since the king found sufficient practice
in the use of arms in battle, why should he do harm to the wild creatures in the forest and
at the same time to his own self ? And even the Jaina author of Niti-sastra says: Calm¬
ness towards evil-doers is the ornament of ascetics, but not of kings.’

When we remember that, already in the hymns of the Rgveda, Indra, the lord of gods,
is a great warrior and slayer of foes ; that the Hindu Epics revel in descriptions of battle
scenes ; that Bhisma is not only a great sage and Yogin, but also a mighty killer of men ;
that the Bhagavad-gita, the most sacred book of the Hindus, teaches a warrior’s morality,
in which slaughter is justified by God Kr§na saying that ‘the soul never slays and is
never slain,’—and when we think of the most recent events in India, we shall hardly be
able to agree with the late DeSabandhu C. R. Das who once said that he was opposed to
1 evolutionary methods because ‘violence is not part of our being as it is of Europe.’

In fact, violence is part of human nature in India, as it is in the West. Every living
('reature has a right to live, and no man has a right to destroy life. And yet, life is impos¬
sible without destruction of life. Booking at it from man’s point of view, there is nothing
as cruel and merciless as Nature, as ‘God’s beautiful creation’ (as it is sometimes called),
m which life and destruction of life—rarely an euthanasia, a beautiful and speedy passing
;\way, more often a slow decay and destruction with infinite pains and tortures—are eternally
interwoven.

And this is the great problem of Ahimsd. In a Jaina legend, a Sahara chief anc. his
wife meet with a Sadhu who teaches them Ahimsd. One day the Sahara and his wife
encounter a lion in the forest. The Sahara seizes his bow to shoot at the lion, but is
reminded by his wife of the Sadhu’s teaching. The Sahara chief throws his weapon aside,
—and of course the couple are swallowed by the lion, but at the same moment thej are
reborn in the Saudharma Heaven as long-lived gods. Infidels as we are, we cannot be
satisfied with such a solution of the Ahimsd problem.

Nay, the problem is there, and we have to face it. It is true that it is often nece.ssary
to destroy life, in order to save our own lives or a more valuable life, and to do harm and
inflict suffering, in order to create some greater good for our people or for mankind. But

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

it is required of us that we should sharpen our consciences, and should not lightly take life
or inflict suffering on any living being, but that we should be at greatest pains to consider
in every single case whether there is really an absolute necessity for killing or injuring.
Only in such a case we are allowed to make ourselves guilty. For we are always loading
guilt upon us whenever we inflict suffering on any living creature.

It is true that violence and hatred are natural, but it is no less true that love and
sympathy are natural. And if we come to think of it, love is wise, and hatred is
foolish, love alone is creative and hatred is destructive. It is an eternal truth that
violence only creates violence again and can never bring peace. As it is said in the old
Buddhist adage; Not by hatred is hatred appeased, by not-hatred hatred is appeased.’

therefore, A.hifhsd^ the not^wishing to hafntf remains a great moral ideal, however
diflScult it may be to achieve it fully. Though we may have to obey necessity and to make
ourselves guilty, we can never cease to strive after this ideal. It may not always be possible
to refrain from hurting, but it is possible to foster in us the will to> non-hurting, the will
to peace.

While everywhere in the world the goddess of-violence is worshipped, and lives without
number are sacriflced to her, there is one man in India, the Mahatma Gandhi who is
holding up the old Indian ideal of Ahimsd, making it his political program. That this
program has found so many followers among the masses of India goes far to prove how
deeply this ancient moral doctrine has taken root in the soul of a great nation.

The Poet, whom we remember to-day in love and gratitude, has said that the force
of arms only reveals man's weakness, and he has said again that peace is true and not
conflict, love is true and not hatred. When people in the West will learn these truths,
when they will have learnt that there is not only truth and wisdom but also strength in
love and Ahimsa, then and then only Western civilisation will be rescued from that utter
ruin by which, in spite of an unheared of technical progress, it is threatened in our days.

GERMAN UNIVERSITY, PRAGUE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA

M. 'VWNTERNITZ

SELECTED TRANSLATIONS

NIOBE

I'l'liree Fragments of an early Drama by the Author written about his twentieth year,
in Rome, during his sojourn at the French school of the Farnese Palace.]

First Fragment

Country round Thebes. At the gates of the town. An autumn evening, shortly
before sunset. Singing in the distance. The Niobids appear, young boys and girls,
holding one another by the hand.

NIOBIDS

0 country of Thebes, soil of our native land, perfumed air that caresses one, how sweet
it is to feel thy loving breath ! And you Cithaeron, ye sacred hills, how I love your
rocky heights, when I follow the hiuit of the leaping deer over the sharp stones ; or
w hen in the solitary purity of the hill-tops the dark azure of the sky is mirrored in my
blue eyes, as I watch the golden clouds floating by, whilst the hidden nightingales sigh
forth their langorous plaints around me tenderly.

Then in the evening I descend, whilst the shadows mount from the sleeping earth
below. The sheep-bells tinkle in the valley. The crickets sound their insistent rattle.
The mysterious atmosphere is illumined by a shower of sparks, golden eyes in peac<i‘ful
flight, with a soft beating of wings. I adorn my fair hair with fireflies, the flowers of
night, and we return gaily towards the high shadows of the walls of Thebes, which stand
out in the distance against the roseate horizon, holding one another by the hand grouping
ourselves in noble dances across the fields, and bathing our white feet in the silvery
streams.

NIOBE

O my children, your voices have the freshness of springs ; your mouths and arms
have the scent of the woods. Deioneus, lole, Hyacinthus, my sweet hearts, how long you
have tarried, this evening ! As soon as you appear, I feel that I was without life, when
I was without you. And thou, Deidamia, dreamer with the languid steps, why dost thou
come alone, my daughter, lagging behind the others? Thy fine pale hair veils thy milk-
white forehead ; what hast thou done to-day, afar from me? Come, tell me.

327

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

DBIDAMIA

Under the trembling leaves of the aspen, by the side of the clear stream, listening
to the ripple of the water flowing between the stones, with silent voice and closed eyes,
without moving, as if in sleep,—I heard the sighs of the wind in the reeds, and the vivid
breath of the zephyr, which refreshed my brow, without soothing my trouble.

NIOBB

What is the matter with you?

DBIDAMIA

I know not. Methinks my heart beats too fast. Methinks ... all the shivers of
the wind pass through me ; and my breast is too small to feel all that I feel.

NIOBB

Scan thy brow against my knees. Thy illness is not an ill, O my Deidamia, it is the
approach of a delicious well-being. (How intoxicatingly sweet it is to: feel the blossoming
of these flowers of my blood, so chaste and so voluptuous !)

And thou, Callirhoe, thou little leaping fawn, thou art not sad, art thou ? Thou hast
no torments, O youngest of the Niobids?

How thou hast run ! The brambles have marked thy brown calves with their claws.
The nape of thy neck is sunburnt. And thy lips are reddened with the pulp of straw¬
berries. What does it matter to thee ? ■ Dost thou but know that thou art beautiful ?
Thou laughest ... Ah ! when love seeks to possess her, how she will fly, my little
swallow !

My heart is pierced with a proud tenderness. My children !

Ye Olympians, look upon us ! Apollo, ocean of light, Artemis, calm lake wherein the
day is mirrored,—which of you, O Immortals, is more beautiful than my sons? Which
of you, O goddesses, is happier than I?

THB POPtTLACB

Niobe, fearest thou not the jealousy of the gods?

NIOBB

It is better to excite envy than pity!

POPDLACB

O my daughter, the one is often very near to the other.

The night falls suddenly. Heavy clouds cover the sky.

[The scene following during a night of storm sees the passing of Atreus, king of
Argos and brother of Niobe, who is pursued by the vengeance of the Olympians.]

Second Fragment

The dark veil of the sky has slowly lifted. Light is reborn. It is a day liket twilight,
soft and sad. The sun sinks behind the hills.

328

■BJBqns;BV\/ 'M JW BujMBjp b J3}ju

9Z61 ‘SI yud iU

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

poptn<ACE

The night grows gently clearer. Her long veils fall back with peaceful majesty.
O day! I shall again see thy beautiful body shine forth! Friend, mine eyes kiss thee
most lovingly.

NIOBE

O Gods, may everything be effaced,—and all that I have said! . . . Yes, the tender
light .... A fresh breath bathes my burning brow. Zeus smiles. Zeus forgives . . .
(Music of distant flutes). What is this plaintive song?

POPUI,ACE

It is the procession of the Great Goddess. Demeter has lost her daughter, the fair
Proserpine. She wanders through the meadows, and calls to her with loud cries. Nature
is in mourning ; she sleeps beneath the earth, fair Proserpine, and for long months Demeter
will groan.

NIOBE

Poor unfortunate . . . My heart is stirred with pity! Ah ! how much I feel it, the
weight of thy grief.

THE NIOBIDS

The gentle autumn is ended. The languishing light smiles mournfully. The woods
of reddish gold extinguish their splendour. Nature sleeps the long sleep of winter . . .
0 flowers, shut your eyes. The hungry earth devours you. You are going to disappear
within her bosom, in the night, and you will deck the fields of Hades for the charming
feet of the young goddess, whilst our hearts will sigh for you .... Tittle fragrant
souls, you are going to console the pale brows of the spirits, who have not forgotten ....
Their exhausted lips, which will drink in your breath, will seek on your lips the traces
of the kisses of bygone days.

But we shall meet again, dear little flowers! And you also, birds that sing of the
spring! We shall rejoice together over the return of the sun, the young shoots that pierce
through the prison of the bark, the amorous thrill of awakening life, the breath of the
earth and the streaming of the waves of light . . . Why am I not already in the midst
of those happy days .... Tovely daughter of the august Ceres, be thou not too faith¬
ful a spouse I Come back to us, young friend, we pine for thee ! Come, we love laughter,
dancing and love. Are we not more pleasant companions than the gloomy Pluto? Come
back, dear friend, come back to join in our choruses! There is always time to sleep
beneath the sod!

NIOBE

My heart is filled with a profound sweetness. The music of your voices, O my
children, effaces the dream which oppressed me. I breathe again. The light lengthens.
The gold of your hair is kindled with its reflections. I see your innocent faces near me.
The blue sky blossoms forth again amidst the rosy clouds. And rending the last veils
with his arrows, Apollo reappears.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Whilst Niobe speaks, the light actually increases, and takes on an intense brilliance.
And when Niobe pronounces the name of Apollo, the apotheosis of the setting sun sets
fire to the horizon. On this red sky appears Apollo, marble-like, dazzling, impassive,
with arm outstretched, bow in hand.

POPULACE

{seized with fright]

Apollo!

{Niobe turns round, utters a stifled cry, can neither speak nor move.)

THE NIOBIDS

{flee in disorder, like a flight of birds.)

Ah!.

[The scene which follows the second fragment describes the chasing of the Niobids
by the Divine Archer.]

Third Fragment

The sun has disappeared behind the hills. It has left behind on the sky, large trails
of golden dust and orange-red reflections, which gradually die out during the foUorving
scene.

NIOBE

O beloved ones, beloved ones 1

populace

O queen, I reply with sobs.

niobe

I cannot bear any more .... I fall.

populace

Friends, let us support her. Unhappy w'oman ! My eyes are flooded with tears !

NIOBE

Weep for me ! I cannot weep.

POPULACE

You see I weep and tear my hair.

NIOBE

My children I My love, my pride and ray life!

POPULACE

They sleep amidst the flowers, which they were singing in praise of, but now.

NIOBE

Ah I thy pity is cruel I ‘But now’ .... But thou, what hast thou done, traitor,
to defend them ? Shouldst thou not have protected them with thy body ? Thou hast
only thought of thyself, of saving thy miserable life I

330

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

popirivAce

Niobe, life is sweet, even to those who suffer.

NIOBE

Coward, then take my life, my horrible life ! Ah! take it, murderer, thou blo:)d-
stained god with the fierce bright eyes, Apollo! Just judge, that takest upon thyself
the charge of punishing crimes, who will punish thine? What had these innocents done
to thee? r alone scorned thee, and I scorn thee still! Executioner, I scorn thee ! Thou
god who slayest children, strike me I Art thou afraid?

POPULACE

Be silent, I pray thee.

NIOBE

What! should I not hate the monster that rends me ?

POPULACE

Alas! they are the gods ; they can do with us what they will.

NIOBE

It is because they can do ev'erything, that I want to hate them. Against tlieir
atrocious power, I have only my contempt ; but my contempt alone is beyond their blows.

POPULACE

Take care lest their vengeance be not exhausted !

NIOBE

What can their vengeance do to me ? There is nothing more that I love I

POPULACE

Grief is like a vast ocean. Who knows all its waves? Grief is like the unfathom¬
able sky. Who has seen its depths?

NIOBE

Grief is limited by the limits of our life. I can die. Therefore I have nothing more
to fear.

POPULACE

Unhappy woman, speak not of the worst misfortune I

NIOBE

I have touched the bottom of the abyss. My soul has descended into infinite night.
NTever again will it see the light that is lost. The void envelops me. I fall. There is
nothing more.

Night falls gently, the beautiful luminous night. The pale green sky is tender like
a flower. The notes of a flute are heard again in the distance.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

POPULACS

In the shades of the forest, the wandering Demeter carries on her inconsolable song
for ever.

Alas!

NIOBB

POPUBACB
{looking at Niobe)

The kindly music has made the tears well forth from her heavy heart.

NIOBB

O sweet and sad lament, which mingles itself with mine! Demeter, have pity !
Thou knowest my grief, I suffer like thee.

POPUBACB

Thou seest, my daughter, the gods are subject to the universal sorrow.

NIOBB

Thinkest thou my heart is so vile as to find solace in the unhappiness of others ? Leave

me! Get thee gone!. (more gently) Friend, I thank thee. Thy heart is good

and simple. But leave me, I would weep alone.

The populace retire silently. The music of the flutes continues very softly in the
distance.

NIOBB

She is seated, leaning on a mound of grass in the middle of the scene.

Demeter, how much we both are suffering! Immortal, thou bearest an immortal
grief, and thy grief blossoms forth, eternally renewed. Unfortunate one, thou canst not
die! But thou, thou wilt see thy daughter again I And I,—they will never return, my
beloved ones. . . . O Demeter, thou knowest not the horror of ‘Never!’ Thy heart is
resigned, and thy calm sorrow breathes forth in solemn laments, filled with pity!

But thou knowest not what means this ‘Never I’ .... Save me! I ask not of thee
the lives of my children. Alas! thou weepest for thine! But death, . . . . O goddess

.me death ! The only grace which is left me, and which the lowest of

wretches has the right to hope for ... . Thy tears fall on me with the evening dew. I
feel thy tender compassion floating in the air ... . What a sudden peace! Behold !
cruel life is leaving me at last. Light, thou art so beautiful I . . . . And yet, to the
unhappy one who suffers, how sweet it is to lose thee!

HERMES

{appears behind Niobe)

Niobe, I am Hermes, messenger of death. Mine is a helping hand. It guides desolate
souls to eternal oblivion. Come, lean on it. Do not accuse the gods. The gods have
pity for thy tears.

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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

NIOBR

{sighs sorrowfully)

Alas! could they not have let them live again ?.

O my beloved sons !

HERMBS

Whilst he\ is speaking, one sees on the face of Niobe sorrow succeeded by resignation,
culm, a melancholy peace, and finally a weary smile. Dying, she gazes up at the sky,
with head thrown back.

Zeus has delivered them. He has saved their souls from the destiny of thy race.
Their arms were broken before being sullied by the heritage of pride and of insane power.
Accuse not the gods, 0 daughter of Tantalus! Think of the reprobate laid low by
thunderbolt! Think of thy brother Atreus, the madman who is carried off by the
hurricane, that howling wolf who bequeathes to his descendants his torments and his

crimes.Thy sons are asleep in the divine smile of nature. They are filled with

the unalterable peace of the Infinite. Their breath is mingled with the serene torrent of
light. Their souls are united with ovr immortal soul. He who has once tasted the
waters of the eternal spring, will never again approach with his lips the troubled waters in

w hich thy tears mingle.Woman, weep no more! The divine Olympians smile

tenderly when they see thee shed so many tears for the sake of living. . . . Soothe thy
wounded heart! Thy grief is ended. I pour upon thy brow the long sleep that kncws
no dream. Under its beneficent balm, pain disappears ; all that which one suffered is no
more. Sleep, Niobe, in the tender arms of the Good Nurse. August Demeter rocks
tliee gently. Here comes the fragrant evening ; like a purple river, the light overfloivs.
The soul that is wearied with the hard labour of the long day sees with joy the approach
ol the great night of Peace. The affectionate breath of the deep earth rises and kisses
tliy heavy drooping head. The all-powerful sun extinguishes its golden gaze. The grave
melancholy of the music dies on the listless air. Everything lapses into silence. Every-
tliing stops. Everything dreams. . . . Everything is dream.

Very soft music accompanies his voice, and fades away, at the end. It is the soft
dull light that follows the day and precedes the night. The moon has not yet risen. Stxrs
blossom in the Pale-green sky. Finally one of them shoots forth. It traces a luminous
furrow on the sky, and dies out.

Niobe 19 seen from the front. At the appearance of Hermes, she has not turned at all, nor mude
the slightest movement to see him; she looks straight before her, and sees him, at is were, within
herself.

To the magic bird of India I offer this youthful song of a little blackbird of
France, who was trying his wings, on leaving the nest.

To Rabindranath Tagore, with my affection and respect.

VILLENEUVE, SWITZERLAND ROMAIN ROLLAND

333

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Rabindranath Tagore
Many years have passed since the day

when I heard Rabindranath Tagore deliver his speech of thanks for the Noble Prize
but I still bear in mind the memory of a stately figure,
clad in loose, flowing robes of grey silk,
and of a countenance of rare nobility.

When one compared it with the other faces there,
it seemed to be modelled with far greater care and skill.

A spirit gifted with a keener thirst for beauty,
or perhaps with a clearer recollection of its heavenly origin
than is commonly vouchsafed to us,

had formed this head and body for its earthly dwelling-place.

I saw him stand at a desk in an ordinary lecture room.

Men and women in evening attire filled it to the last place.

Everywhere one met familiar faces ;

not for a moment could one forget

that one was in Stockholm, in ‘Old Sweden.’

The lecturer spoke in English—clear and easily comprehensible English.

Not for a moment could one forget
that one was in Europe, and in the West.

But the foreign bard began to speak to us,
and, in a few simple words,
transported us to a far off, magic land.

I dare not say that it was precisely India,
but it was a land which he bore in his heart ;
a land without unrest, a land of peace,

where no jealous strivings, no harassing lust for power had place.

A heavenly peace enveloped us,

we wandered, as it were, along the banks of slowly gliding streams ;
under the summer stars we listened to the gentle words of wisdom ;
and life was shaped anew by fair and happy people
into poetry and good-will.

When it shall dawn—that day, so distant, so ardently longed for,
when life has reached its goal, when the final harmony is attained,
and the old dream of Paradise has become a reality ;
then will the men of that time remember the Indian seer

334

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

as one among those who prepared the happy future,
as oire among those who, with invincible hope,
uprooted the poison-plants of hatred,

to sow in their stead the apples of love, and the roses of peace.

STOCKHOLM SELMA LAGERIfOF

I shall never forget the day when my husband gave me Gitanjali and we began to
read those beautiful hymns together. It was like coming home,—I know no better word
for that blissful feeling when the soul finds its resting place. From that day Rabindranath
l agore has been the light of our home and the treasure of our hearts. Other wonderful
books followed—the Gardener —the Crescent Moon —and then, during the time of
the war, those unique lectures, full of wisdom; Nationalism and Sadhana. It was
then that Rabindranath Tagore actually became the centre of my life, that I laid down my
school work and entirely devoted myself to the translation and propagation of my Poet’s
work. For in his books, I firmly believe, the deepest longing of the human soul finds its
fulfilment.

Rabindranath Tagore, Thou Golden Book of Wisdom and Beauty, Thou blessed
Messenger of God, My heart bows to Thee!

WANDSBEK HELENE MEYER-FRANCK

What message can mighty India give us?

There is no higher message, than that of her renunciation of every force other than
that of spirit.

And what spiritual lesson can India give us, of the preaching of which we stand
in need?

There is none more impressive, than the song of freedom, in sonorous strophes, with
which the Poet charmed us when he was a guest in our country and we came to see him.

We shall remember his tall figure and his radiant visage.

For we are come out of the power of dispensation and the infinite might of the same
Creator.

FRANKFORT-ON-MAIN ALFONS PACQUE'F

335

TO RABINDRANATH TAGORE

FROM SERGEY VASILENKO. MOSCOW

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

b?-

338

'firfj

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

340

GREETINGS FROM HIS MAJESTY THE SHAH OF PERSIA

342

[translation]

O N this happy occasion of the revered Sage’s noble life reaching its seventieth
birthday—of the Sage who has so fully illumined and enlightened the eyes and
the hearts of all his friends and the well-wishers of the world of humanity—
I tender to your noble self my Sovereign His Imperial Majesty Reza Shah Pehlevi’s
high regards for and appreciation of your life and work.

At the same time, I take the opportunity to offer you personally my most cordial
sentiments on the occasion, and my sincerest wishes and benedictions for your long and
prosperous life,—a life fraught with happiness to others.

TEHRAN, PERSIA FOROUGHI,

Minister of Foreign Affairs

343

FROM THE CONSUL-GENERAL OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA FOR INDIA

May your life be as perpetual as the

movements of the Moon and the Sun ;
Equivalent to the longevity of the
Southern Mountain;

And as flourishing as the Pine and the Cypress.

CALCUTTA

CHANG MING

GREETINGS FROM THE FIRST PIONEERS’ COMMUNE

(translation at page 265)

ropy).

O -N

OPOl'OM nodl.

1^ p.k'Hb ftbiwu'ro L'i;'MKip,t'r.AinJii.'THftro IlnoHt'p - f{oNNbM(=f miib'i'

L'tbori POP^kMM rtOMM'OMflPl.'llMM npUlb^T. libMMbWflPbl W
I'llllviHA'l’ 10? I^O?0PblM lOPOlblrSlll tbNtC'c' L'ftftMU.

Mw ;(opouio noiviWM nfchw MH^:^ciIoro Hfipop,tt, i<o'oP!d'^ '^bi hpm rit'jin.

floL'iifc' ftfiiuefO oi’i-A^^ vKttiHb ^osiPRo SPOL'visiH Hftc ibnePt'fj, aloT
Nasib'UbHvill nPOMfc'Vti^lOK ftpt'Wt'HH C(^k'51«(l6t Ht'l'AoSibllD PbrONdilKlA

f\fc'Hb WVlHOCn? lift' HOObli: Vt HOIbWb' ‘PCit? PVitlv'l, 3ftfbDf:\V)|, iIOiOPWU'
f^oL'PoHMo ftbii^ojiH^iw? il^kTuiiPTnnvt. Toi*o cai^oro iirwHft, ibDiiiosiHu'nut'

(^o'oPOPo ML^ /JHfoHO IbCb' IbPMflA CHnr«5in ‘^fAWfebMevt.

HflPO^A ?lt)OVn? orpOn't'SlHCUbf bMftftCllb'jW)? HP '\OStblIo

Ib’oPOfilblP, bfO M HptblPk' MrdiSiMOHfl PPb'i’l WPHt'Poft, r<o7oPblb' , ^I0

ONH L'Tponlt'SiH Hb' 'lOJihtIo HO n MHC'To'vHjb'ro. VlftfiiM tlONN'dHHPbl

ftWt'L'Tb* I-'O p.BP'dTC^t Hbi 'pij^OBOM cpponTt' L'?PHHb|. Mb)

phBoT'j bM 3Mt5o^e MtMfiiipiorwrHHTt' „Ct'Pn m 'Mojiol'!’ 3?o? 3 hb>cu:\ PHWbUJt'

iptiH6ipj!n?vK(sS\ cppHHi^bSdoH'o HoOh'c-ifPiCi'j hvioH^. Hf) 3f^toop^u' t'mt' v'clb 0rTeA))^vi
nftporo. K‘?b ht'L'ooKfiTwibHbit' phRohuu* i<o?o?biu' hhlTo npQrai\iifcfi»o?,
ilbS(HL'7c,\jw?. foo? L' SbviNH pHb'uMbMw I'lbi b'oiibUi^w (bocnwratt'5)fen'll©

PMbO'^. iMbl OPViMlr u5ll:>i PWHHP ClPOP - 97o CO^-l'OPEfcHOlbaMUt'

b't'Pb>( c HMX tlbV^3MTfc';ihL'l£)0 hb' llPOf^^iMIbftTfe- b) u'6)MlA lb L'lbfttO OHt'Pb'ftb
ob'A!)iit'ML'Ji AoPouio ■'a'lk'ubC,^ ft iIkIomi?. (^0nPOridilblllMl^Olb i-'ilOrtO •
b'oSib'IiL- ML' L'PblftH'lb l.'‘iP0Ml\'-J, tl nPl1K.S?b ft ML-M Phb'oT'), Ec?h t'U|L'

L'lPHHHOfc' HftL'Ilb'pMb' L'ThPOPo - ^ro HBfPAWoTHOL'Tb. fe L'?PHHU' t'mt' COTttVl Itrtl'qij

Hb'PPHNOiHWX JlWp;£H H Nbl ?n>Kl: ftllSiW'inilflL'b ft PHb'ol'J Ho b'OPbPb' C

345

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Ht'rPftMOlHonbVO. Hbi l\po|Vll? aioto Nlit

(ivjiibi^PHbKi fb (^pf>L‘'K 0 M sjCoSifc', i») isiib'Siiioiiiiiit'. PAlSoTy no

BKb'^Ph'MviW I't'XWlKH \-b pAfiOHHfc' MACCbl b'llPOL'TvAHt'HWb*
nPOtbfc'p^t'Hnt* llONOU^b Rl OPfAHMiJA^Vin Tt'X l(P^y{|lOO H ■?< p,)

|Mb> t-IA L'ljOb'P Ob'^b'L'ribt'HHOM PWb'olt' nojjl^lT m^L-'L'(( i/'i ilOL'l'lPtrbli5f)l?l'n

l-'t'b'Pi n >b ‘JL'SlP 6 «;iX rtOMMbMbI roiOBi^lVl (jtSll 7 rio»'l

^til6|f(V( toci\vi iMHOro L'HAL'Tbii n fti:Tpt'Tnu'/i tlAL*' R<13

C rb MtKb'H L'lJOb'OpHOH COMMaRMtTHift'CKOM L'lP/JN^

346

GREETINGS FROM HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF SIAM

H IS Majesty the King has been pleased to command me to convey his felicita-
tions on the occasion of the Seventieth Birthday Anniversary of Rabindranath
Tagore.

I wish moreover to record my great pleasure (in complying with the request of
the Golden Book of Tagore Committee) in writing something on this occasion. As
an Asiatic and a Buddhist, I cannot but admire the cultured expressions and
sympathies of the great Poet. As a worker in the field of education I wish to put on
record my appreciation of the clear-sighted and sound theory maintained by Rabindra¬
nath Tagore. As a personal acquaintance, having had the pleasure of receiving him
a few years ago in this country, I have been charmed by the magnetic personality of
the poet and philosopher.

BANGKOK

DHANI

FROM PRINCE DAMRONG RAJANUBHAB OF SIAM

I T was during his visit to Siam in 1927 that I had the pleasure of meeting
Dr. Rabindranath Tagore, whose conversation and speeches left on me a most
favourable impression. I knew of his reputation as a poet, and had seen some
of his books in translation ; but it was personal contact which enhanced the opinion
I had formed of his great qualities.

I am glad to take this opportunity to congratulate Dr. Tagore on the approaching
Anniversary of his Birthday, the Seventieth year of a long and useful life. By the
power of the Three Gems, may he be blessed with health and strength, long to
continue to guide the mission of his life.

VARADIS PALACE, BANGKOK DAMRONG

I T gives me great pleasure to express my tribute of respectful affection and pro-
found esteem for the Poet Rabindranath Tagore and to offer him my heartfelt
and warmest congratulations upon the completion of the Seventieth year of his
noble life. In him I ever rejoice to see a happy and unique blend of purity and
simplicity as well as a meeting place of the best in cultures of the East and West,
With all the fervour at my command I pray the Almighty Lord to grant a long life
of health and happiness as well as many turns of such joyous occasions to Rabindranath
Tagore, the shining gem in the intellectual crest of India, our Mother'land.

THE PALACE, BHOR, BHOR STATE R. S. PANT SACHIV

I am asked by the University to convey the felicitations of the Andhra University on
the attainment of the Seventieth Birthday of the Poet. His work for the
cultural renaissance of the country is unrivalled. And we are delighted to
know that one, who infused the spirit of courage and self'reliance into the minds of
our young men at a time when defeatism was invading us, is happily still with us,
and we pray that he will live long to enjoy his welLearned rest.

348

ANDHRA UNIVERSITY,
WALTAIR

S. RADHAKRISHNAN

FIRST PIONEERS’ COMMUNE COMPOSING GREETINGS FOR THE POET (MOSCOW, 1930)

O N behalf of the Professors and Lecturers of the Post-Graduate Arts Department
of the Calcutta University I offer you our heartiest felicitations on the happy
occasion of your Seventieth Birthday. Your life-long devotion to the cause
of culture has very largely helped the attainment by our people of the goal for which
the Calcutta University stands. You have immensely enriched the literature of
Bengal, and have inspired your countrymen with the lofty ideals of nationalism and
internationalism. The lustre of your genius has illumined the minds of men in the
West as well as in the East, and has spread the name and fame of your dear Mother¬
land. Although to-day you are a world-poet, Bengal claims you as her own and
feels a pride in your greatness. May you enjoy health and happiness for many years
to come, and may you continue long to render service to your country and to
liumanity at large.

THE UNIVERSITY, PRAMATHANATH BANERJEA

CALCUTTA

L’ Academie Royale de la Langue et de Litterature Franjaise de Belgiques associe
aux manifestations de sympathie et d’ admiration en I’honneur du poete Rabindranath
Tagore.

BRUXELLES

VAN ZYPE

RABINDRANATH AS CONVERSATIONALIST

Sarhsara-visa-vrksasya dve eva madhure phale:
kdvydmrta-rasdsvddah, sangamah sdjjandih saha.

‘'^HE poison-tree of Life bears only two sweet fruits: the immortal taste of
1 Poetry, and converse with the great.*

So says the Sanskrit poet.

Anybody who has had the good fortune of hearing the Poet talk has enjoyed
the taste of both these fruits.

Those who have not had the privilege of knowing him intimately may form
some idea of the wonderfully illuminating character of Rabindranath’s conversation
from his *Pancha Bhuter Diary’—imaginary conversations which are only a transcript
of his own talks.

I know nothing in literature which can be compared to them, except some of
Plato’s earlier dialogues.

CALCUTTA

PRAMATHA CHAUDHURI

349

B oth as an economist and as a Zoroastrian it is my pleasant duty to express my
admiration of one particular aspect of the many-sided activities of the great
Poet of India. It has not always been duly emphasised that the University
movement so widely and closely associated with his name has a special aspect as
regards moral reconstruction and progress in India. While so many have envisaged
the carrying back of industries to the villages, it is he alone who has not only con¬
ceived but carried out the idea of taking University education to the very door of
the peasant. For half a century this was his dream ; but for the last decade it has
become a performance and an achievement. For in founding the Sri-Niketan
(the abode of Lakshmi) he has taken back, in very truth, not only her but her august
sister Saraswati as well, to their rural and natural environment. May they long
continue to bless rural India, and may the example thus set by the Poet secure imita¬
tion all the world over.

CALCUTTA J. c. COYAJEE

Love and Grateful Remembrances.

TOTNES, DEVONSHIRE, LEONARD AND DOROTHY ELMHIRST

ENGLAND

I T is given to few men in our generation, or in any generation, so to gain the atten¬
tion of the youth of our universities that, besides being enlivened in their
apprehensions of beauty, their whole spiritual apprehension is kindled. To
Rabindranath Tagore belongs this distinction. In Harvard University we have
especial reason to remember with gratitude his presence. The great opening dis¬
course on personality, in the book called Sadhana, was first delivered there ; and we
recall still vividly his noble and stirring addresses relating to the modes of meeting of
East and West. With full heart, we join in the greeting and recognition of this day.

CALCUTTA

350

WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING
(harvard university)

I T is very difficult to write a suitable appreciation o£ the work of our great poet-
philosopher. His beneficent influence has been so manifold and wide-spread that
many pages would be necessary for the purpose. I shall confine myself, therefore,
to only one aspect which has appealed to me most, and, under the present circumstances
of the country, appears to me to be most beneficent. What appeals to me most is the
very practical turn that he has given to the abstrusest doctrines of our philosophy,
by proving that the salvation, not only of India, but of the whole world, lies not in
reforms and in systems of government, but in the change in the innermost recesses
of our hearts.

THE UNIVERSITY, ALLAHABAD GANGANATHA JHA

TAGORE, ARTIST AND INTERNATIONALIST

I happened to be in Italy when the first English translation of Gitanjali appeared,
and I well remember the impressions of some of my Italian friends. In Italy, as
in other Western countries, artists had been exploring the field of sensations, and
it seemed to them as if there were no new fields whence to create new masterpieces.
A sentiment of staleness was evident in many of them. When, then, Tagore
appeared on the scene, it seemed as if once again something of the tender bloom of
spring was to be felt in the invisible field of events which is the domain of Art.
It was the artlessness and child-like response of Tagore to Life which seemed so
deliciously fresh and young. Of course, behind his art, there lay a philosophy that
was exquisite to the materialistic mind of the West. But above all things, it was
the new glow of youth which charmed all in the West who discovered Tagore.

It is this element which has moved Europe and the two Americas very deeply.
Three years ago I spent twelve months in travel in seventeen countries of Latin
America. In every one of them all the educated men and women knew of Tagore—
whose name, however, they pronounced in the Spanish fashion Tagore—and
through his writings had contracted what was to them the romance of India. Not
only had most of them read his writings, but I think there was scarcely a home
among them where I was a guest which did not have several of his works in
translation.

All those who have had the privilege of knowing Tagore know how one of
the most lasting impressions about him is his youthfulness. Who of us who has
ever seen him dance will forget the sense of delight at seeing an elderly man throw
himself with the abandon of a child into an artistic creation like the dance? The
unity of the various aspects of Art is so strong in him that he is not solely a poet.

351

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

as are so often poets in the West. He is a musician, actor and dancer too, and
therefore every song and every play of his has a larger content than is the case with
similar creations in the West.

Tagore’s work at Santiniketan is now famous, and is a matter of pride for
India. His contributions in the domain of education show, particularly to us in
India, what is the only way to build the new Indian Nation.

MADRAS C. JINARAJADASA

London Bengali Literary Society wishes you long life and fulfilment of your
Ideals.

LONDON PRABODH BOSE

R abindranath Tagore has by hfe-long creative activities proved that
the the vast evolution of culture, education, philosophy and art in modern
India qualifies ourselves in a special measure to co-operate with other countries
and nations on the cause of the development of international spirit and world peace.
The cosmopolitan institution established by him at Bolpur which has for its main
object the synthesis of the culture of the East and the West is a signal manifestation
of his ideals. Our hearty felicitations to the Poet on this auspicious occasion.

DELHI B. L. MITTER

We convey to you from the Authors* Club of New York our sincere regard and
greetings on your birthday.

NEW YORK

MONTROSE J. MOSES
DANIEL HENDERSON

Heartfelt greetings. Praying for India and World Unity.

NEW YORK HINDUSTAN ASSOCIATION

352

N ew History Society in memory of your gracious presence offers heartfelt felicita¬
tions on your birthday. May you as herald of new age continue shedding
spiritual influence over hearts of East and West uniting man in aspirations for
universal peace.

NEW YORK CHAIRMAN

Love and best wishes.
TAHITI, OCEANIA

M. DUBOIS

Institute Indian Civilisation congratulates on Seventieth Anniversary. Best
wishes and love.

A. FOUCHER, S. LEVI

HOMAGE OF YOUTH

S alutations to you, Gurudeva, our beWed Master, on completing the
seventieth year of your noble and sublime lifel It is indeed an occasion of
rejoicing and jubilation for your disciples, friends and admirers all over the world,
whom have reached your winged words with the subtle message of Light and
Beauty, Hope and Harmony, The youths of the world will, I feel, hail this
auspicious opportunity by offering thanks to God and profound homage to you.

AHMEDABAD MANILAL PATEL

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

The Oriental Institute in Praha greets you on the threshold of the seventieth
year of your fruitful life, wishes you peaceful days for the rest of your journey in
this world and thanks you for the work done for your Nation, for Humanity and for
drawing the East and the West nearer together.

PRAGUE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA PRESIDENT

353

Love and gratitude from American Quakers.

PHILADELPHIA, PA., U.S.A.

PICKETT

R abindranath represents the ideal of the progressive culture, not only
national or international, but of universal humanity [Visva-manavd).

This has been possible for him, on account of the alLembracing and alLpervading
sympathy which his great soul entertains for all the movements throughout the ages,
relating to the human as well as the extra-human.

This loving interest has found expression not only in his poetry, painting, disser¬
tations, and other effusions of his soul, but also in the various creative efforts that he
has made throughout his life for the advancement of humanitarian interest and
humanistic ideals.

From this view-point Science, Philosophy, Poetry, Art and Religion are but
different aspects of such culture as is essential to man.

The human race, generally speaking, however, is yet a long way behind the
attainment of this life-giving objective. In the present stage of human progress it is
only in very rare instances that we notice an earnest pursuit of this ideal by an
individual, for less an achievement. The hearts are few that respond with a glowing
love to everything that happend in the past, that are happening now in the present,
and that will happen in the future in this great dwelling-house of man. The eyes
are few that are gifted with the vision of seeing everything, irrespective of the limita¬
tions of time and space. The lips are few that can pour into unwilling and
sceptical ears the outpourings of a soul that feels and a mind that sees. The personali¬
ties are few that bend in a contagiously loving and prayerful reverence before the
Supreme Master.

Rabindranath, however, is far ahead of others in his easy progress towards those
ideals. It is with a sense of pardonable pride that I congratulate myself in being
able to appreciate the supreme beauty of his art, the soul-stirring effect of his poetry,
the profoundness of his universal sympathy, the all-comprehensiveness of his vision,
and the intensity and loftiness of his religion.

Poet, Seer, Worker, Lover, our divine Rabindranath occupies to-day the
tenderest spot in every heart that feels. May his spirit forever illumine the path of
humanity through his motherland.

THE UNIVERSITY, CALCUTTA NIL RATAN SIRCAR

354

South African Indian Congress send you grateful thanks for all you have done
for us in sending out Mr. Andrews and giving us your own blessing. May God
give you many years of further service for humanity. Please spare us Mr. Andrei vs
again and ask him to come back to us and help us in our trouble.

DURBAN

DR. RABINDRANATH TAGORE

O F the few persons who have made the culture of modern India understood and
appreciated by the world at large, Rabindranath is perhaps the most brilliant
and outstanding exponent. He has helped to dispel an immense volume of
ignorance about our country and our culture, and we cannot adequately express our
admiration and feelings of indebtedness to him. India in the imagination of the
West was a country disunited by castes and creeds, the home of strange religious
rituals and practices. Her culture was considered as a thing of the past. Therefore
the translation of Rabindranath’s Gitanjali evoked admiration mingled with surprise
in his readers outside India.

The ideas about India and her civilization began to improve when the West
awoke to the consciousness that India was still an intellectual and spiritual force in
the world, radiant with beauty and pulsating with life.

On the occasion of the seventieth birthday of the Poet, some of the greatest
minds of Europe and Asia have united to pay their tribute of honour and reverence
to him, and thus Rabindranath has been instrumental in making the East and West
meet on a platform of equality.

We should be grateful to Rabindranath, not only because he has won through his
poetry such a splendid recognition for India, but also because of the greater cause of
humanity which he has served. He has realised in his soul the unity of man and
the harmony of nature. The ideal which he has set up is freedom of the mind and
spirit, and universal peace and good-will by true understanding between the peoples
of the East and of the world at large.

He has founded a University at Bolpur in Bengal which is a striking piece
of original work. He has dissociated himself from the beaten track of university
education. He has not founded a denominational institution for the benefit of any
one class or section of people, but has set up a seat of learning named Santuniketan —
the ‘Abode of Peace,’ placed amidst nature’s own surroundings. Its atmosphere of
freedom and simplicity is a stimulating factor in the discipline of the mind and body.

355

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The poet has realised in a way that few people have that a liberal education alone can
bridge the gulf of narrow denominational bias and prejudice.

Rabindranath’s poetry is marked by a singular freedom from conventionality.
His songs speak with a touching sincerity and with the naturalness of his relation^
ship with the Unseen ; his passionate love of nature and his mystic sensitiveness are
supreme.

His first spiritual inspiration must have come from his great father, Maharshi
Debendranath Tagore. The Maharshi was a passionate admirer of the mystic
poetry of Sufiism, and Rabindranath’s poetry, too, in its spiritual content is reminiscent
of the poems of the immortal Hafiz and other great Sufi or mystic poets of Iran.
His external appearance has the stamp of a Persian saint and a Muslim Sufi. The
Tagores with their broad spiritual outlook, received the best from Islamic mysticism.
In their culture they seem to indicate the best type of Hindu-Muslim Unity.

My thoughts naturally turn to the friendly relations between our national poet
and the University of Calcutta. Rabindranath has been associated with the Univer¬
sity of Calcutta in setting papers in Bengali and in examining theses for our
examinations. His active co-operation was obtained by the late Sir Asutosh
Mookerjee in connexion with the scheme of higher studies and research in Indian
Vernaculars. His books are studied by our students as text-books. He also
delivered a series of readership lectures in the University in the year 1923. The
stimulus that Rabindranath gave to a scientific study of the Bengali language and
literature has been largely responsible for the collection of about 9,000 manuscripts
in the Post-Graduate Department of our University. In 1913, during the Vice-
Chancellorship of Sir Asutosh Mookerjee, my great predecessor, our University con¬
ferred the degree of D.Litt., honoris causa, on the poet, on the eve of the award of
the Nobel Prize. To me personally it is a matter of the greatest satisfaction that as
the first Muslim custodian of this great Temple of Learning I should be called upon to
arrange the University celebrations in connexion with the Seventieth Birthday of the
cosmopolitan Rabindranath Tagore—a great embodiment of Hindu-Muslim culture
and unity.

THE UNIVERSITY, HASAN SUHRAWARDY

CALCUTTA

OM !

T O the supremely'gifted Seer, the rightful heir to the heaven'illumined spirit of
the Maharshi, is reverently rendered this humble homage, through the devoutest
pranamas, of a heart that is moved with deep gratitude for the rich inspiration
emanating from his sublime teachings. Out of the untold treasures of his golden
words the one held most precious by the struggling, foot-sore way-farer is the evangel
that God sets up His dear abode where dwell the humble and the lowly, the neglect¬
ed and the dejected. He who by His breath kindles the quenchless stars, yet
seeks delight in the frail earthen lamps of man; He who passes in His royal progress
attended with all the wealth of the worlds, yet pauses to stretch out His hand for
the least of the little grains in the scrip of the beggar. Is not he who conveys this
exalting message a closer friend, a nearer brother, of humanity than he who brings
down wisdom from heaven to earth? For heaven, imagined to be far ofiE, is here
brought home to our hearts as enveloping and transfiguring whatever seems of the
earth earthy. With all its after abasement, the soul, in essence, is God-born ; and
to the pure eye of the All-Holy it is pictured even as the image of His Beauty—
a Joy unto Him for ever. God takes joy in His creation, and the spirit of His
Paradise pervades the earth everywhere. Here is the perfect presentation of the
God of Love {Anandant), and here the sure ground of faith in Soul’s Immortality
(Amritam), Thus is God ‘magnified,’ and His Rishi ‘proved.’

PITHAPURAM, R. VENKATARATNAM

MADRAS PRESIDENCY, INDIA

Warmest wishes, love and greetings.

WANNSEE, BERLIN BRUNO & HERTHA MENDEL

Warmest wishes, faithful love.

VILLENEUVE, SWITZERLAND MADELEINE ROLLAND

AfEectionate greetings on your seventieth birthday and best wishes from your
Quaker friends.

LONDON

A. T. SILCOCK

357

E steemed Master, the ancient Charles University at Prague, Czechoslovakia,
highly appreciates your great merit, your work, and your influence, both moral
and material, for culture and science. All your life you have bestowed gifts
upon East and West in the great endeavour to draw them together. We sense the
beauty of your work, and recall that our University had the honour of attending your
learned address. We wish you. Master, all success as Poet, Teacher of your own
people, and Prophet.

LESNY, HUJER,

Professor of Indology Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy

FREEDOM IN SPIRIT AND CULTURE

W HEN my people are again in possession of a great and living culture, and can
surrender themselves completely to the interests of Humanity, it is then, not
national freedom only, that will have put them in a position to do so: but,
even as the Greeks had first to surrender their national independance to their
conquerors the Romans, before they were in a position to bestow their cultural gifts
to the latter, it will be a freedom which Rabindranath Tagore has begged for his own
people in his Gitanjali,

Long may he be spared us to be the Guru for many.

THE HAGUE, HOLLAND ‘ NOTO SOEROTO

358

Though somewhat late, I cannot hesitate to pay tribute for the great services
which Rabindranath Tagore, the famous Poet and Philosopher, has rendered to the
world of culture. Ther^ore, on my behalf and on that of my country, I ofEer my
congratulations to the revered Poet on his Seventieth Anniversary.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN ALI MOHD. KHAN

Minister of Education

Canadian Delegation to League of Nations greets you on your Seventieth
Birthday and wishes you health and happiness for many years to come.

GENEVA

GUTHRIE

Dear Dr. Kalidas Nag,

The Academy of Athens has received your invitation with great pleasure. It
has specially touched those members of our Academy who are Poets, for they stand
closer to the great work of your National Poet and have deeper admiration of his
achievements. Rabindranath Tagore’s poems, distributed all over the world through
various translations ever since the award of the Nobel Prize, have met with students
and translators in our country as well. The interest in the work of the celebrated
Indian Poet has become m.ore wide-spread now in Greece. We admire profoundly
his fertility in all branches of literature, lyrical, narrative, as well as dramatic.
Tagore has combined the tradition of the profoundly philosophical speculations of
his ancestors with all the elegance of occidental art. We know further that his
creative activities go beyond the limits of pure poetical inspiration, that is, the
elevation of humanity, the renaissance of his own country, and last, though not
least distinguished factor—World Peace.

Hence we participate whole-heartedly in your Tagore Celebration, and we greet,
from the historic land of Greece, the living symbol of the hoary wisdom of India.
Some specimens of that wisdom reached us eighty years ago through our renowned
Athenian writer, Demetrios Galanos, who translated some of your ancient texts from
the original Brahmanic language.

May Rabindranath Tagore live long and continue his glorious and creative
work for the good of humanity.

THE ACADEMY, ATHENS PRESIDENT

359

HOMAGE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I N closing this Golden Book in print, before presenting it to the public I cannot help
feeling that I have the privilege of recording only a few of the myriad voices
speaking to Rabindranath. And while thanking our contributor-friends for
their eloquent tributes to the Master Poet and to India, I cannot but raise niy humble
voice at the end, to remind the readers of this volume, that the silent love and good-
wishes of the countless admirers of the Poet, all over the world, supply the real and
permanent base of this superb Golden Music composed on this solemn occasion. The
Inarticulate collaborate as vigorously as the Articulate with the Spinners of soul-
symphonies : else how could wO have a Beethoven? So our profound gratitude goes
spontaneously to all those lovers of Beauty and Harmony who could not by chance
enter formally into the list of contributors to this Golden Book, yet who combine to
give the golden touch of love to every line of this volume. Those deeper undertones,
those subtler upper partials, go to enrich and enliven the chance anthology of Greetings
and Appreciations, Offerings and Dedications in the Golden Book,

Love alone can evoke love; and Rabindranath, the supreme musician, has un¬
consciously though inevitably drawn men and women the world over into this cosmic
orchestra. He sang to the rivers, and the hills, to the flowers, and the shooting-
stars, and they sang back to him, enriching his lyrics with their musical echoes. He
sang to men and women, and they responded, as they must, to the exquisite importu¬
nities of a lover. He scented like a Seer the epidemic of Greed and Hatred slowly
undermining the health of Humanity, and he threw away the flute of poetry for a
while, and struck the warning chords of prophecy. In an age of Discord he sang of
Harmony—‘the august marriage of Love and Hatred,’ as sung by his great musical
confrere Romain Rolland. So his voice is as much of the ageless past as of the limitless
future, as should be the voice of all world-poets. After centuries Rabindranath has
sent forth a voice—his voice, from India and the renascent East, to every corner of the
globe; and that voice has touched sympathetic chords in human hearts from Finland
to South Africa and from Russia to Oceania—mystic orchestration of Life and Things
—augury of a great future, wherein India and the Orient will co-operate with the rest
of the world to bring out a new Era of Peace, Goodness, and Unity, of Santam,
Sivam and Advaitam —basic elements in our Poet’s Temple of Harmony. That
temple is nowhere, and yet it is everywhere ; and Rabindranath’s supreme call to “the
humblest, the lowliest and the lost’’ will carve for him a niche in the eternal pantheon
of human poetry, and will ever shine as a beacon light to that supreme fruition of
human destiny.

* # *

360

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

We are now ofEering the Golden Book to Rabindranath. In 1930, when
various suggestions were being considered for the celebrations in connexion with the
Seventieth Birthday of the Poet, it was felt that a permanent token of the world’s
appreciation should be presented to him on that occasion. [This idea was voiced by
M. Remain Rolland in the following Appeal communicated to Mr. Ramananda
Chatterjee, our present Chairman, with a covering letter dated 30th Sept., 1930:

Rabindranath .Tagore accomplit, en mai prochain, sa soixante'dixieme annee.
Cette date doit rassembler autour de lui ses amis dans le monde, tous ceux dont la
vie a ete eclairee, elargie, ennoblie par la sienne. II a ete pour nous le symbole vivant
de I’Esprit de lumiere et d’harmonie, qui plane, grand oiseau libre, au milieu des
tempetes,—le chant d’eternite qu’ Ariel fait vibrer sur sa harpe d’or, au dessus de
la mer des passions dechamee.

Mais son art souverain ne s’est jamais desinteresse de I’humaine misere et des
luttes heroiques des peoples pour la liberte. II a ete “la grande Sentinelle,’’ comme
I’a nomme Gandhi (qui serait le premier parmi nous, pour le feter, s’il n’etait separe
de nous par les murs d’une prison). II fut, aux heures tragiques, la vigie au regard
lucide et intrepide, de son people et du monde.

Au nom des milliers, que sa voix melodieuse a nourris d’esperance de foi et de
beaute, nous convions ses amis poetes, artistes et savants a venir lui presenter, pour
la fete de mai 1931. une gerbe de leurs fleurs et de leurs fruits spirituels. 11 ne
s’agit point d’hommages rendus personnellement au Poke—(nous croyons savoir
qu’il ne le desire point). Mais, en signe de gratitude, que chacun lui offre une
branche de son jardin: un poeme, un essai, un chapitre de livre, une recherche
scientifique, un dessin, une pensee!

Car tous ce que nous sommes et ce que nous avons cree a ses racines ou ses
rameaux baignes dans le grand fleuve Gange de poesie et d’amour.*

*Iii May next Rabindranath Tagore completes his seventieth year. This occasion ouglit
to bring round him his friends all over the world—friends whose lives have been illumined,
broadened, ennobled by his own life. He has been for us the living symbol of the spiiit
of Tight and of Harmony,—the great free bird which soars in the midst of tempests,—tlie
song of Eternity which Ariel makes to vibrate on his golden harp, above the sea of
unloosened passions.

But his sovereign Art has never remained indifferent to human misery and to tlie
heroic struggles of peoples for freedom. He has been the “Great Sentinel” as he was
named by Gandhi (who would be the first amongst us, to greet him, if he is not separated
from us by the prison walls). In tragic hours, Tagore is the clear-eyed and undaunted
watchman of his own people and of the world.

In the name of thousands whom his melodious voice has nourished with hope, faith
and beauty, we invite his friends, poets, artists, scholars, to come forward and present to
him on his seventieth birthday celebration, a bunch of their spiritual fruits and flowers. It
need not be a personal homage to the Poet (we know that he does not like it). But as a
token of gratitude, everyone might offer him a twig from his own garden—a poem, an
essay, a chapter of a book, a piece of scientific research, a drawing, a thought.

For, all that we are and all that we have created, have had their roots or their branches
bathed in the great Ganges of Poetry and Love.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

The idea was taken up in India and abroad, and Mahatma Gandhi, Prcf. Albert
Einstein, M. Kostes Palamas, and Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose joined M. Remain
Holland in sponsoring The Golden Book of Tagore and issued an appeal. The
contents of the volume testify to the response which this appeal has received.

A Golden Book of Tagore Committee was formed with the following gentlemen
as members:

Charu Chandra BhatTacharya, M.A., Department of Physics, Presidency College,
Calcutta.

Nandalal Bose, Director of the Kala-bhavan, Visva-bharati, Santiniketan.

Raj Sekhar Bose, Author, and Manager of the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical
Works, Ltd., Calcutta.

Amiya Chandra Chakravarty, B.A., Lecturer, Visva^bharati, Santiniketan.
Kedar Nath Chatterjee, B.Sc. (London), Manager, Prabasi Press, Calcutta.
Ramananda Chatterjee, M.A„ Editor of the Modern Review and the Prabasi,
Calcutta.

SUNITI Kumar Chatterji, M.A. (Calcutta), D.Lit. (London), Khaira Professor of
Indian Linguistics and Phonetics, Calcutta University.

Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri, M.A., Asst. Editor, The Modern Review, Calcutta.

O. C. Gangoly, Solicitor, and Editor, Rupam, Calcutta.

Amal Home, Editor, Calcutta Municipal Gazette,

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, B.Sc. (Calcutta), M.A. (Cantab,), I.E.S.,
Professor of Physics, Presidency College, Calcutta.

Kalidas Nag, M.A. (Calcutta), D.Litt. (Paris), Department of History, The Uni'
versity, Calcutta.

Mr. Ramananda Chatterjee was requested to act as Chairman and Editor,

I beg to express my best thanks to my colleagues, the Members of the Committee,
for all they have done in bringing out the Golden Book, Mr. Amal Home and
Mr. Amiya Chandra Chakravarty were in charge of the collection of contributions in
the early stages. Mr. Raj Sekhar Bose, Mr. Charu Chandra Bhattacharya and Mr.
Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri attended to the general work of the Committee and
business arrangements. Mr. Nandalal Bose, in addition to his own pictorial contri'
butions, is responsible for the cover design and the decorations for the special copy
presented to the Poet. The best thanks of the committee are due to Mr. O. C.
Gangoly and Mr. Kedar Nath Chatterjee for their valuable services in connexion
with the illustrations. Finally I wish to offer my personal appreciation and thanks
to my friends Mr. Suniti Kumar Chatterji and Mr. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
for the help they rendered unstintedly in seeing the book through the Press.

362

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

I have further to place on record the enthusiastic support rendered b)' the
proprietor of the Art Press, Mr. Narendra Nath Mukherjee, as well as by his entire
staff ; and also to Messrs. U. Ray & Sons for the care with which they have reproduced
the illustrations.

The Golden Book of Tagore Committee places on record its grateful dianks
to those whose co-operation alone made the volume possible— viz. the Contributors
and the Artists, and the owners of the pictures' who permitted us to use them for the
book.

We regret that it has not been possible to print all the contributions received,
as some of them arrived too late for inclusion and some had been already published
fully or in substance. Certain contributions had to be edited and condensed mainly
owing to reasons of space.

The Committee also has to express its thanks to those ladies and gentlemen
including members of the various consular services in Calcutta and Bombay for
furnishing translations and in some cases revising proofs of contributions in languages
other than English.

Cordial thanks of the Committee are due to the warm support given to it by the
(.Founder-Subscribers, in practically guaranteeing the publication. Without their
co-operation it would have been exceedingly difficult to produce the volume.

Any profits accruing from the Golden Book will be funded for a Ravindra^
Vijaya, a Tagore Commemoration of a permanent and international character.

I have also to crave indulgence from the Contributors and the Public for some
inaccuracies which have unavoidably crept in the typography, and for the absence of
system in arranging the contributions. The actual work of printing could be taken
in hand only after the end of the first week of December, and it was completed during
the last week of the same month: the task of receiving and marshalling contributions
from all over the world was to some extent responsible for this.

This book, however, inspite of all its deficiences in printing and format, is offered
to the Poet, and to all who love him and his works, as an embodiment, in its varied
contents contributed from all parts of the world, of the guiding principle of
Rabindranath’s own Visva-Bharati, viz-i

Yatra Vi§vam bhavaty Eka-m(}am
‘Where the Whole World finds its One Nest.’

CALCUTTA, KALIDAS NAG

27 th December, 1931 Secretary,

Golden Book of Tagore Committee

363

A JAGORE CHRONICLE; 1861—1931

The following brief chronicle has been compiled! to give some idea of important phases
of the Poet’s career, and his activities mainly in the literary sphere. Dates of works have
been selected with this purpose in view, without giving an exhaustive bibliography.
Excepting important publications in English, no mention has been made of the large
number of translations of the Poet’s works into the other languages of the world.

Ihe Poet took a leading part in all the dramatic performances mentioned here, but
no attempt has been made to give a complete list of all performances in which he appeared
himself. No mention has been made of the performances in the Santiniketan School in
which he often takes an active part, nor of the numerous productions of his plays on the
public stage in India and abroad. The dates of composition of Songs—about 2000 in
number—have also been omitted.

It has not been found feasible to include references to Rabindranath’s contact with
personalities in India and abroad. Neither has it been possible to indicate his active
participation in the educational and cultural, social and religious, and economic and political
life of his country, and his untiring efforts to promote international good will and peace.
In the case of Eectures and Sermons only a few of outstanding importance have been
mentioned.

The date of Bengali publications in book form is given within brackets ; the approximate
date of writing outside brackets. In the case of English translations, the dates refer to
publication either in journals or in book-form. Most of the publications in Bengali give
the Bengali year which begins in April. Owing to this lack of correspondence with the
European year, a discrepancy of one year may have occurred in a few cases in which the
month of publication could not be traced.

PRASANTA CHANDRA MAHAEANOBIS

The following abbreviations have been used:

B.E.

= Bengali Era

h. = Tetters

V. = Verse

B.M.

=Bengali Monthly

N. =Novel

V.D. =Verse Drama

=Essays

P.D. = Prose Drama

vols. = volumes

Eng. tr. =English translation pub. =pnblished

Eng. = Volume (s) partly or wholly written and published in English.

In the Bengali names in Italics, it may be noted that a is pronounced as in Eng. all; c as Eng. ch.;
f, s, s all like Eng. sh; and v as b (after a consonant,=w).

The Poet’s family belongs to the Sandilya clan (goira) of the RSdhiya branch of Brahmanas, and
his aneesters are believed to have settled in Radha or West Bengal about the 8th century After Christ.
In the 17th century the Poet’s family acquired the distinctive appellation Thakur, .meaning ‘Respected
Eord’ (Seigneur)^ which was Anglicised first as Tagoure, and then as Tagore.

The Poet s name in Bengali is Ravlndranath Thakur, the v in Bengali being pronounced as b.
The literal meaning of the personal name, RavindranSth {Ravindra-natha in the original Sanskrit form]
and usually written as Rabindranath in English) is ‘Sun-Eord’.

364

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

1861. Rabindranath Tagore born on Monday, May 6, 1861. (VaiBkha 25, Saka
Era 1783, Bengali Era 1268).

1867-74. Irregular attendance at various schools and studies at home with private
tutors. First experiments in versification about 1868.

1873-74. Upanayana (Initiation) ceremony: first acqaintance with the Gciyatrl
prayer. First visit to Santiniketan, and the Himalayas, with his father, Maharsi
Debendranath.

Sarada Devi (mother) died March 8, 1874.

1875-76. First publication of writings: Poem composed on the occasion of the
Hindu Mela pub. in the Amrita Bazar Patrika, Feb. 25, 1875. Also poems, literary essays,
and a long poem, Vana-phul (V., 1879. Wild Flower) in 8 cantos in Jnandnkur, a Bengali
Monthly (1282-83 B.E.).

1877- 78. First appearance in dramatic performance as Alik Bobu in a Bengali
Comedy by Jyotirindranath (elder brother). A new B.M., Bhdratl, started in Srdvana,
1284 B.E. (July, 1877) under the editorship of Dwijendranath (eldest brother). In 9 months
the Poet contributed about 22 poems, (including some of the poems of Bhdnusimha Thdkur,
1884), 2 essays, 6 articles of literary criticism, a long story [Bhikharini, the Beggar Maid),
an unfinished serial novel (Karund), and a long poem, Kavi-Kd.hini (V., 1878, A Poet’s
Story). Sojourn in Ahmedabad, Bombay Presidency, April—September, 1878, First
musical compositions.

1878- 80. First visit to Europe: left Bombay, September 20, 1878. Joined school
in Brighton, then University College, London. Studied European music. Returned to
India early in 1880.

Contributed to Bhdratl numerous poems and ballads, some of which were collected in
SaUav Sanglt (V. 1884, Songs of Childhood) ; literary essays (including articles on Anglo-
Saxon Literature, Dante, Petrarch, Goethe, Anglo-Norman Literature, Chatterton, etc.),
translations from Shakespeare, Burns, Moore, Shelley, Tennyson.

Yurop-pravdsir Patra (1881, Letters of a Visitor to Europe). Bhagna-hrday (V.D. 1881,
The Broken Heart) begun in England. On return composed two musical dramas, Vdlmiki-
pralibhd (1881, The Inspiration of Valmiki) and Kdl-mrgayd (1882, The Fateful Hunt)
and took leading part in dramatic performances of both.

1881-83. Poems of Sandhyd Sanglt (1881, Evening Songs). Active participation in
attempts to start a Bengali Literary Academy. Vividha^prasahga (1883, Miscellaneous
Essays) and Bau-thdkuranlr Hat (1884, The Bride-Queen’s Market), first completed novel,
started Bhdratl in 1881. First public lecture in Calcutta on ‘Music’. Left for England to
join the Bar, but returned from Madras, 1881. Rudra-canda (V.D. 1881) Poems of Prabhdt
Sangit, 1882-83 (V. 1883, Morning Songs). Sojourn in Karwar. Prakrtir Pratisodh
(V.D. 1884, Eng. tr. ‘Sanyasi,’ 1917). Poems of Chavi 0 Gdn (1884, Pictures and Songs).

Married Mrinalini Devi, December 9, 1883 {Agrahdyana 24, 1290 B.E.).

1884-90. Poems of Kadi 0 Komal (V. 1887. Sharps and Flats, includes translations
from Shelley, Mrs. Browning, Ernest Myers, Aubrey De Vere, Augusta Webster, P. B.

365

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Marston, Victor Hugo etc.). Prose sketches of Alocand, 1884-85 (Discussions). Diterary
studies collected in Samdlocand (1887, Criticism). First 2 short stories. Nalini (P.D.
1884). Started new B.M., Bdlak, from Vaisdkha, 1292 B.E. (April, 1885, amalgamated
with the Bhdratl after 1 year) to which he contributed about 12 poems, 20 articles on various
topics, 9 letters on social questions {Cithi-patra. 1887), 8 humerous sketches in dramatic
form, one prose drama, Mukut (1908, The Crown), and a serial novel, Rdjarsi (1887, The
Saint-King). Joint-editor, Pada-ratndvali (1885, anthology of Vaishnava lyrics). Decture
on Satya (Truth) 1885. Ravi-chdyd (1885, 1st collection of Songs). Secretary, Adi Brahmo
Samaj (The Theistic Church of Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Maharshi Debendranath)
1887-1911. Poems of Mdnast 1887-90 (V. 1890, The Heart’s Desire). Lecture on ‘Hindu
Marriage, 1887. Mdydr Kheld (Musical Drama, 1888. Play of Illusion). Appeared as
King Vikram in performance of Rdjd 0 Rant (V.D. 1889, Eng. tr. ‘The King and the
Queen,’ 1917). Appeared as Raghupati in Visarjan (V.D. 1890, Eng. tr. ‘Sacrifice,’ 1917).
Took charge of the management of the Tagore Estates.

1890. Second visit to Europe, August-November, 1890: Italy, France, England.

1891-95. Started new B.M., Sddhand, from Agrahdyana, 1298 B.E. (November,
1891) to which he contributed for 4 years numerous poems, stories (collected in Chola
Galpa ; Vicitra Galpa 2 vols. ; Kathd-catustaya, 1894 ; Galpa-daiak, 1895) ; literary essays,
reviews, political articles and topical notes. Foundation Vice-President, Vangiya Sahitya
Parishad (Bengal Academy of Letters), 1894.

Yurop-ydtrir Bdydri (1891-93, Diary of a Traveller to Europe). Citrongadd 1891
(V.D. Eng. tr. ‘Chitra,’ 1914). Poems of Sonar Tart (The Golden Barge) 1892-93.
Lecture on Sik^dr Her-pher (The Tortuosities of Education) 1892. Panca-bhiiter Bdydri
from 1893 (E. 1897, Diary of the Five Elements). Poems of Citrd 1893-95 (V. 1896).
Viddy-abhUdp 1893 (V.D. 1894, Eng. tr. ‘The Curse at Farewell,’ 1924). Lecture on
‘Englishmen and Indians,’ 1893. Essay on ‘Folklore,’ 1894. Mdlini, 1895 (V.D. Eng. tr.
1917), and poems of Caitdli (The Last Harvest) 1895-96, published together with the 1st
collected Poetical Works (Quarto, 1 vol.) in 1896. Nadi (V. 1896, The River).

1897-1902. Appeared as Keddr in dramatic performance of Vaikunther Khdtd (Prose
Comedy, 1897, Vaikuntha’s Manuscript). Essays on Ancient India and ideals of civilization.
Kanikd (iV. November, 1899, Sparks), Kathd (V. January, 1900, Stories), Kdhini (V.
March, 1900, Tales), Kalpand (V. May, 1900, Dreams). Editor, Bhdratl (1898-99),
contributed in 1 year about 15 poems, 7 stories, 6 social and political essays, 4 religious
and educational studies, 12 literary essays, and 1 verse drama, Laksmlr Parlksd (The Trial
of Lakshmi). Poems of Ksanikd (The Fleeting One), 1899-1900. Cira-kumdr Sabhd,
prose comedy, 1900-01 (The Bachelors’ Club). Poems of Naivedya (V. 1901, Offerings).
Essays on the Upanishads (Brahma-mantra, Aupanisad Brahma, etc.).

Founded the Brahma-Vidyalaya (Santiniketan School), December 22 1901 (Pausa 7
1308 B.E.). ’ ■ ’

Editor, Vanga-darsan (B.M., new series) for about 5 years from Vaisakha, 1308 B.E.
(April, 1901). Cokher BdU, novel, 1901-02 (N. 1903, Eng. tr. ‘Eyesore,’ 1914). Poems

366

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

of Utsarga, 1901-03 (V. 1914, Dedications). Lecture on Atyukti (Exaggerations, with
reference to the Delhi Durbar), 1902.

Mrinalini Devi (wife) died November 23, 1902 (-Agrahayana 7, 1309 B.E.).

1902-05. Poems of Smaran (In Memoriam), 1902-03. Naukd-dubi, novel, 1903-04
(Eng. tr. ‘The Wreck,’ 1921). Poems of Sisu 1902-03 (The Child, partly in Eng. tr.
‘Crescent Moon,’ 1913). Collected Poetical Works in 13 parts, 1903-04. Swadeshi and
anti-Partition (of Bengal) movement. Lecture on Svadest Samdj, 1904. Sivdjt Utsav,

1904. Swadeshi (patriotic) Songs (collected in Bdul^ 1905). Political essays (collected in
Atma-Sakti and Bhdrata-varsa, 1905).

Maharshi Debendranath (father) died January 19, 1905 (Mdgha 6, 1311 B.E.).
1905-10. Editor, Bhandar (B.M., political and economic) for 2 years from Vaisakha,
1312 B.E. (April, 1905). Active participation in the National Council of Education,
1905-06. Rdkht-bandhan ceremony, October 16, 1905. Lecture on Vijayd-sammilan,

1905. Poems of Kheyd, 1904-06 (V. 1906, Crossing). Prose Works (exclusive of novels
and short stories) in 16 vols. (comprising literary studies, 5 vols. ; social and political,
4 vols. ; educational 1 vol. ; linguistic 1 vol. ; and religious 1 vol.), 1907-08. Gord,
novel, 1907-10 (N. 1910, Eng. tr. 1924). President, First Bengali Literary Conference,
1907. President, Provincial Conference, Pabna, 1908. Lecture on ‘East and West,’ 1908.
Sdradotsav (P.D. 1908, Eng. tr. ‘Autumn Festival,’ 1919). Prdyascitta (P.D. 1909,
Atonement). Sermons and religions discourses (1908-14) collected in Sdnti-niketan (17
parts, 1909-16). Most of the poems of Gttdnjali written 1909-10. Rdjd (P.D. 1910, Eng.
tr. ‘The King of the Dark Chamber,’ 1914).

1911. Fiftieth Birthday Celebrations; Poet as Thdkur-dddd in performance of
Rdjd at Santiniketan, May, 1911 ; Celebration in Calcutta 1911-12: Address presented by
the Vangiya Sahitya Parishad.

1911-12. Acaldyatan (P.D. 1911, The Immovable Monastery). Lecture on ‘Hindu
University,’ 1911. First publication of translations into English by the Poet, 1911-12.
Attempts at reconstruction of Adi Brahmo Samaj. Editor, Tattvabodhim Patrikd, 4 years,
(1911-15). Lecture on Dharmer Adhikdr (The Right to Religion, 1912). Jlvan-smrti
1910-12 (1912, Eng. tr. ‘My Reminiscences,’ 1917). Chinna-paira (1912, Letters written
1885-1895. Eng. tr. ‘Glimpses of Bengal,’ 1921). Lecture on ‘Bhdratavarser Itihdser
Dhdrd (Main Currents of Indian History), 1912. Ddk-ghar (P.D. 1912. Eng. tr. ‘The
Post Office,’ 1914). Projected visit to Europe postponed owing to illness, March, 1913.
Translations of Gttdnjali poems into English during convalescence.

1912. Third Foreign Tour (May, 1912—September, 1913). English ‘Gitanjali’
published in England, 1912. Lecture tour in U.S.A., winter, 1912-13.

1913. Lecture on ‘The Realization of Life’, London (published in Eng. ‘Sadhana’).
Returned to India, September, 1913. Eng. ‘Gardener’ and ‘Crescent Moon.’

Nobel Prize in Literature. Public reception at Santiniketan. D. Litt. (Honoris
Causa), Calcutta University.

367

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

1914-16. Started village welfare work at Surul. Chief contributor to new B.M.,
Sabuj-patra (mainly literary) from VaUdkha, 1321 B.E. (April, 1914) for about 3 years.
Giti-mdlya (V. 1914, Garland of Songs) poems written mainly 1912-14. Gitdli (V. 1914)
poems written in 1914. Recepient of Knighthood. Poems of Balakd, 1914-16 (V. 1916.
French tr. ‘Cygne’ 1924). Short stories (collected in Galpa-Saptak, 1915). Caturahga,
novel, 1914-15 (N. 1916, Eng. tr. ‘Broken Ties,’' 1925). Mahatma Gandhi and the inmates
of his Asram resided temporarily at Santiniketan, 1915. Phdlgunl, prose drama, 1915
(Eng. tr. ‘Cycle of Spring,’ 1917). Started Viciird, a literary club, in Calcutta, 1915-20.
Ghare-bdire, novel, 1915-16 (N. 1916, Eng. tr. ‘The Home and the World,’ 1919).
Lecture on Siksdr Vdhan (Vehicle of Instruction) 1915. Performance of Phdlgunl, January,
1916. Paricay and Sahcay (2 vols. of collected essays, 1916). Collected Poetical Works
in 10 vols. (1915-16). Eng. ‘Fruit-gathering’ and ‘Hungry Stones,’ 1916.

1916- 17. Fourth Foreign Tour (May, 1916—March, 1917). Lectures in Japan
(Eng. ‘Nationalism’ 1917). Lectures in U.S.A., 1916-17 (Eng. ‘Personality,’ 1917).

1917- 20. Jdpdn-ydirl (L. 1919, Traveller to Japan). Eng. ‘Stray-birds,’ 1917.
Performance of Ddk-ghar in the Vicitra. Lecture on Kartdr Icchdy Karma (As the Master
Wills), 1917. Chairman, Reception Committee, Indian National Congress, Calcutta (for
a few days only). Guru (P.D. 1918). Poems of Paldtakd 1917-18 (V. 1918, Fugitive).
GUa-pancdhkd and other collections of songs, 1918-20. Lecture on ‘The Centre of Indian
Culture,’ 1918. Eng. ‘Lover’s Gift and Crossing,’ ‘Mashi and Other Stories,’ 1918.
Renounced Knighthood in protest against the Jalianwalla Bagh incident at Amritsar,
1919. Lecture on ‘The Message of the Forest,’ 1919. Prose sketches of Lipikd (1922)
written mostly in 1919. Chief contributor to new B.M., ‘Sdnii-nikeian (Patrikd)/ school
magazine published from Santiniketan from April, 1919. Arup-ratan (P.D. 1920).

1920-21. Fifth Foreign Tour (May, 1920—^July, 1921). England, France, Holland,
U. S. A., Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Czecho-slovakia. Lectures
on ‘East and West,’ ‘An International University,’ etc.

1921. Returned to India, July, 1921. Lecture on Siksdr Milan (Meeting of Cultures)
and Satyer Ahvdn (The Call of Truth). Eng. ‘The Fugitive.’ Varsd-mahgal (Music
Festival of the Rainy Season).

Sixtieth Birthday Celebrations : Address presented by the Vangiya Sahitya Parishad.

Inaugural Ceremony of the Visva-bharati at Santiniketan, December 22, 1921 (Pausa
8, 1328 B. E.).

1922-24. Foundation of Sriniketan (Department of Rural Reconstruction, Visva-
bharati) February, 1922. Mukta-dhdrd 1922 (P. D. 1922. Eng. tr. ‘The Waterfall’ 1922).
Sisu Bholdndth (V. 1922, Child Poems). Eng. ‘Creative Unity’ 1922. Visva-bharati
Sammilani, literary club, started in Calcutta, 1922. Presided over Shelley Centenary, 1922.
Varsd-mahgal (Rain-Festival), and Sdrodotsav (Autumn Festival) 1922, Vasanta-utsav
(Spring Festival), 1923. Started new English Journal, ‘Visva-bharati Quarterly’ (Editor,
1st quarter, April, 1923). Appeared as Jay Sirhha in performance of Visarjan 1923.
Ratha-ydtrd, 1923. (P. D., Eng. tr. ‘The Car of Time,’ 1924).

368

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

1924- 25. Sixth Foreign Tour (March—^July, 1924): Burma, Malaya, China, Japan.
Eng. ‘Talks in China’, 1925. Rakta-Karavi, 1924 (P. D. Eng. tr. ‘Red Oleanders’, 1924).

Seventh Foreign Tour (September, 1924—^February, 1925) : invited to attend Peru
Centenary, but returned from Beunos Aires (Argentine Republic) owing to illness ; visited
Italy in January.

1925- 26. Most of the poems of Purahi (V. 1925) written during- the South Amerii-an
tour. Performance of Ses-varsan (Last Rains, musical drama) 1925. Pravahinl (V. 1925.
Collection of Songs). Grha-prave^ (P. D. 1925. The House-Entry). Sodh-bodh (P. D.

1925. The Reckoning). First President, Indian Philosophical Congress, December, 1925.
Katir Pujd (P. D. 1926. Eng. tr. ‘The Worship of the Dancing Girl,’ 1927). Rtu-utiav
(P. I). Collection of 5 Season Festivals).

1926. Eighth Foreign Tour (May—December, 1926) : Italy, Switzerland, Austria,
France, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Czecho-slovakia, Hungary, Jugo¬
slavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Turkey, Greece and Egypt.

1927. Ninth Foreign Tour (July—October, 1927): Malaya, Java, Bali, and Siam.

1927-29. Performance of Natir Puja in January, and (Cycle of Seasons) in

December, 1927. Nata-rdj, verse drama, 1927. Yogdyog (Cross Currents), novel, 1927-28,
(Is. 1929). Seser Kavitd (The Last Poem) 1928. (N. 1929). Poems of Mahud (V. 1929)
mostly written in 1928. Sermon on ‘The Message of Ram Mohun Roy,’ Bhddra 6, 1.335
B.E. (August 22, 1928) in commemoration of the Centenary of the Brahmo Samaj (Theistic
Church of India). Eng. ‘Fireflies,’ and ‘Letters to a Friend,’ 1928. Lekhan (Writing),
composed at various times, published in 1928.

1929. Tenth Foreign Tour (February—July, 1929): Malaya, China, Japan ; attended
tl.e Triennial Conference of the National Council of Education, Canada ; U. S. A. ;
Iiido-China.

1929- 30. Message to the Parliament of Religions, Calcutta, 1929. Ydtn (Letters,
i;/29. Traveller). Paritrdn (P. D. 1929, Redemption). Tapati (P. D. 1929). Performance
of Tapati, 1929. Bhdnusimher Patrdvali (Letters, 1930). Various Educational Primers.

1930- 31. Eleventh Foreign Tour (February, 1930—^January, 1931): France,
England, Denmark, Germany, Russia, U. S. A. Hibbert Lectures in England in 1930 on
‘'i'he Religion of Man’ (1931). Exhibition of Drawings in Europe and U. S. A.

1931. Rdsiydr Cithi (Letters from Russia, 1931). Performance of Navln (musical
drama) in March, Gitonutsav (Music Festival) in August, Elallr Pujd and Sdp-mocan
(Dance ; Expiration) in December. Vana-vdnt (V. 1931. Forest-message). Glta-vUdn
(Collection of Songs, 1931).

Seventieth Birthday Celebration at Santiniketan, May, 1931. Civic, National and
International Celebrations in Calcutta, 25th—31st December, 1931.

Presentation of THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE, on the 27th December, 1931.

369

FOUNDER-SUBSCRIBERS

Miss May Arathoon, Villa Primrose, Monte Carlo, Monaco.

Rishikumar Pandit Ramdas Baduni, Gliari Pauri, Garhwal, U.P., India.
Kumar Pramathesh Barua, Gauripur Raj, Gauripur, Assam.

Birendra Kumar Basu, i.c.s.. District Judge, Bankura.

Srimati Kanak Prabha Basu, 11, Mahendra Goswami Lane, Calcutta.
Jehangir Framji Batliboi, 48, Ridge Road, Malabar Hill, Bombay.

E. C. Benthall, 37, Baliganj Park, Calcutta.

Prof. Pandit Basanta Kumar Bhattachahyya, Jyotirbhushan, 105, Grey
Street, Calcutta.

Sheokissendas Bhattar, President of Indian Chamber of Commerce, 30, Clive
Street, Calcutta.

Gustadji D. Billimoria, Bombay.

Brijmohan Birla, 8, Royal Exchange Place, Calcutta.

Lakshminivas Birla, 8, Royal Exchange Place, Calcutta.

Karunabindu Biswas, 117/1, Bowbazar Street, Calcutta.

Dr. Ajit Mohan Bose, 5/1, Swinhoe Street, Calcutta.

Himansu Mohan Bose, Bar-at-Law, 25/1, Rowland Road, Calcutta.

Dr. Kartick Chandra Bose, m.b.. Dr. Bose’s Laboratory, 45, Amherst Street,
Calcutta.

Mrs. Nalini Bose, C/o. Dr. Devendra Mohan Bose, 92, Upper Circular Road,
Calcutta.

Nonigopal Bose, b.s. (Com.), “Foxchase,” 18, Los Angles Avenue, Hollywood,
Philadelphia, U.S.A.

Raj Sekhar Bose, 14, Parsibagan Lane, Calcutta.

Sarat Chandra Bose, 17, Woodburn Park, Calcutta.

Ras Bihari Bose, 79, Onden, Aoyama, Tokyo.

J. M. Bottomley, b.a. (Oxon.), i.e.s.. Director of Public Instruction, Bengal.

Amiya C. Chakravarty, Santiniketan, Bengal.

Mathuramohan Chakravarti, Sakti Aushadhalay, Dacca.

Mrs. Arundhati Chatterjee, C/o. Kedar Nath Chatterjee, 2/1, Townshend
Road, Calcutta.

Asoka Chatterjee, b.a. (Cantab.), 2/1, Townshend Road, Calcutta.

Bijay Chandra Chatterjee, Bar-at-Law, 21, Baliganj Circular Road, Calcutta.
Mrs. Kamala Chatterjee, C/o. Asoka Chatterjee, 2/1, Townshend Road,
Calcutta.

Kedar Nath Chatterjee, b.sc. (London), 2/1, Townshend Road, Calcutta.
Ramananda Chatterjee, m.a.. Editor, The Modern Review, Calcutta.

Subimal Chandra Chatterjee, 33, Linton Street, Calcutta.

SuNiTi Kumar Chatterji, Professor, the University, Calcutta.

Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya, Santaber, Panitras, Howrah, Bengal.

Amiya Nath Chaudiiuri, Bar-at-Law, 42, Jhautala Road, Baliganj, Calcutta.

370

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Mrs. B. L. Chaudhuei, 9A, New Park Street, Calcutta.

Mrs. Mira Chaudhuki, C/o Praphulla Cuaudiiuri, 4, Sambhunath Pandit
Street, Calcutta.

Kumar J. K. Acharyya Chaudhury, Muktagacha, Mymensingh, Bengal.
Sajan Kumar Chaudhuri, m.l.c., 21, Belvedere Road, Alipur, Calcutta.

Mrs. Sita Chaudhuri, C/o. Sudhir Kumar Chaudhuri, 283, Park Circus.
Calcutta.

Sheth Jivanlal Choonilal Chinai, 79, Masjid Bunder Road, Mandvi, Bombay.
Gulzarsingh Chore, Bakuba, Tanganyika Territory, East Africa.

Laura W. Cole, 570, South Greenwood Ave., Pasadena, California, TJ.S.A.
Norman Franh Coleman, a.m., ll.d., Reed College, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
James H. Cousins, Theosophical Society, Adyar, Madras, India.

Seth Dinshaw F. Daboo, b.a.. Park View, Lunsikui, Navsari, Bombay Presy.

S. N. Dalmia, 70, Cotton Street, Calcutta.

Rai Bahadur Girish Chandra Das, 35/1 A, Badur Bagan Street, Calcutta.
Nalini Nath Das Gupta, Bengal Civil Service, Noakhali.

Bhulabhai J. Desai, Advocate, Bombay.

Mrs. Indira Devi, C/o. Pramatha Chaudhuri, 20, Mayfair, Baliganj, Calcutta.
Mukul Chandra Dey, a.r.c.a.. Principal, Government School of Arts, Calcutta.
Sir Hormusjee Cowasjee Dinshaw, kt., m.v.o., o.b.e., 121, Meadows Street..
Fort, Bombay.

Mrs. M. Van Eeghen-Boisrevain, Meentweg 5, Naarden, Holland.

Bruce M. Falconn, 26, East 63rd Street, New York, U.S.A.

F. J. Fielden, m.a. (Lond.), m.a. (Cantab.), Principal, Agra College, Agra.

H. H. General Sir Kaisar Shamsher, j.b.r., k.b.e., Kaisar Mahal, Kathmandu,
Nepal.

Justice Bipin Bihari Ghose (retired), Dover Lane, Calcutta,

The Hon’ble Justice Sir Charu Chandra Ghose, kt., 10, Debendra Ghose
Road, Calcutta.

K. B. Ghose, Solicitor, 6, Old Post Office Street, Calcutta.

Anu Ghosh, 19, Dumdum Road, Calcutta.

M. Ghosh, m.a., b.l., 39, Russa Road, Calcutta.

Rai Badridas Goenka Bahadur, c.i.e., m.l.c., 145, Muktaram Babu Street,
Calcutta.

Tulsi Charan Goswami, Serampore, Bengal.

SisiR Kumar Gupta, 55, Canal East Road, Calcutta.

S. K. Gupta, b.a., 41, Girish Park North, P.O. Beadon Street, Calcutta.

Dr. Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, Kansas City, U.S.A.

SuDHiNDRA Kumar Haldar, i.c.s., Calcutta Club, Calcutta.

W. W. Hawkins, 230, Park Avenue, New York City, U.S.A.

37*

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Phabhudayal Himatsingka, M.A., B.L., Pi, Chittaranjan Avenue, Calcutta.
Gael Adaleix Hogman, Publications Chitra , Paris.

Mes. Ila Home, C/o. Amal Home, 99/IN, Cornwallis Street, Calcutta. .
Aethue Hughes, Chinsurah, Bengal.

De. L. K. Hydee, b.a. (Cantab.), ph.d. (Heidelberg), Aligarh University,
Aligarh, U.P.

Mes. Stephanie Hydee, Doctor of Philosophy (Berlin), Aligarh University,
Aligarh, U.P.

D. J. Ieani, B.A., ll.b., 49, Esplande Road, Fort, Bombay.

Cueeimjee Jeewanjee, Port Louis, Mauritius.

Peof. Amaeanath Jha, English Department, Allahabad University, Allahabad.

Bhagieath Kanoeiya, 8, Royal Exchange Place, Calcutta.

A. P. Kapue, 177, Khetwadi Balk Road, Bombay.

Devipeasad Khaitan, M.A., B.L., 8, Royal Exchange Place, Calcutta.
Duegapeasad Khaitan, m.a., b.l., 43, Zakaria Street, Calcutta.

Kalipeasad Khaitan, m.a., b.l., Barrister-at-Law, 43, Zakaria Street, Calcutta.
Lakshmi Naeayan Khettey, 44, Maniktala Street, Calcutta.

Miss Adah L. Kieffee, b.a., 76, Linden Avenue, Engle Wood, New Jersey,
U.S.A.

Kumae Keishna Kumae, m.a., b.l., M.R.A.S., 31, Burtola Street, Calcutta.

Sheth Kastuebhai Lalbhai, Pankore’s Naka, Ahmedabad.

Naeendeanath Law, m.a., b.l., p.e.s., ph.d., 96, Amherst Street, Calcutta.
Anieka Yan Leggett, Villa Star-Poggiochiaro, Gastello, Florence, Italy.

ViNco Lesny, Professor, Czech University, Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Miss Alma L. Lissbeegee, 802 West 86th Street, New York, U.S.A.

J. J. Lynn, 6440, Brooklyn Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.A.

Mes. Niemal Kumaei Mahalanobis, C/o. Peasanta Chandea Mahalanobis,
210, Cornwallis Street, Calcutta.

Peasanta Chandea Mahalanobis, Professor, Presidency College, Calcutta.

K. C. Mahindea, 12, Mission Row, Calcutta.

Mahaeaja Kumae Udaychand Mahtab, b.a., the Palace, Burdwan, Bengal.
SisiE Kumae Maitea, m.a., ph.d., Hindu University, Benares.

John I. B. McCulloch, New College, Oxford, England.

The Hon’ble Me. Justice Satyendea Chandea Mallik, b.a. (Cantab.)

M.A. (Cal.), I.C.S., 7/3, Burdwan Road, Calcutta.

Raghunath Mallik, m.a., 237, Maniktala Main Road, Calcutta.

H. H. Pangeean Aeio Adhipati Mangkoenegoeo VII, Mangkoenegoran,
Soerakarta, Java.

Mes. B. R. Mehta, Palmlands, Nepean Road, Malabar Hill, Bombay.

SisiE Kumae Mitea, Professor, University College of Science, Calcutta.

The Hon’ble Sie Beojendea Lal Mittee, kt.. Member, Executive Council,
Government of India, Delhi.

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF TAGORE

Rai Bahadur Khagendba Nath Mitteb, m.a., 10, Dover Lane, Calcutta.
Pbof. Sushil Chandra Mitteb, m.a., d.litt. (Paris), No. 4, The Mall,
Dum Dum.

Sib Rajendba Nath Mookerjee, k.c.i.e., k.c.v.o., 7, Harington Street,
Calcutta.

Birendbanath Mookerjee, m.a. (Cantab.), 12, Mission Row, Calcutta.

The Hon’ble Mb. Justice Manmatha Nath Mukherjee, m.a., b.l., 8/1, Harsi
Street, Calcutta.

Nabendbanath Mukherjee, 31, Central Avenue, Calcutta.

Mahabani Lila Devi of Mymensingh, 74, Lower Circular Road, Calcutta.

Kumari Santisri Nag, C/o. Db. Kalidas Nag, 283, Park Circus, Calcutta.
SooRAJMULL Nagarmull, 61, Harrison Road, Calcutta.

Pbithwisingh Nahar, B.A., 38, Indian Mirror Street, Calcutta.

Mrs. Henry Necaisulmer, 225, West 86th Street, New York, U.S.A.

Major Fred J. Ney, m.c.. Secretary, National Council of Education, Winnipeg,
Canada.

K. M. Panikkar, Secretary, Chamber of Princes, Bhopal.

Sree Raja Rao Venkata Kumara Mahipati Surya Rao Bahadur, o.b.e.,
Maharaja of Pithapuram, Madras Presidency, India.

Seth Hanuman Prasad Poddab, m.l.c., 10/ A, Chittaranjan Avenue South,
Calcutta.

Lakshman Prasad Poddar, 2, Hastings Park Road, Alipur, Calcutta.

Rustom Sorabjee Powvala, Homecroft, The Ridge, Malabar Hills, Bombay.

Rao Bahadur S. E. Ranganadhan, m.a., Vice-Chancellor, Annamalai University,
Chidambaram.

C. S. Rangaswami, Editor, Indian Finance, Calcutta.

Sib Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, kt., Vice-Chancellor, Andhra University,
Waltair, Madras.

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, kt., m.a., ph.d., d.sc., ll.d., f.r.s..
Professor, the University, Calcutta.

Sardarsinhji R. Rana, 56, Rue Lafayette, Paris.

M. V. V. Rau, Bengal Nagpur Railway Audit Department, Calcutta.

Dr. S. C. Ray, Editor, Industrial <SJ’ Finance Review, 14, Clive Street, Calcutta.
Bezawada Gopala Reddi, Buchireddipalem, Nellore Dist., Madras Pres., India.
Asoka K. Roy, Bar-at-Law, Calcutta.

Basanta Kumar Roy, New York, U.S.A.

Bhupendbanath Roy, Behala, 24-Perganas, Bengal.

Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury, Principal, Government School of Arts, Madras.
Dharani Mohun Roy, 85, Amherst Street, Calcutta.

Manindra Nath Roy, 'Behala, 24-Perganas, Bengal.

Sudhib Kumar Rudra, m.a. (Cantab.), Reader in Economics, the University,
Allahabad.

373

THE GOLDEN. BOOK OF TAGORE

Joseph A. Sadony, Valley of the Pines, Montague, Michigan, U.S.A.

Pkincess Savitribai Sahiba, C/o. B. T. Dhavale, b.a., l.d.m., Snehalataganj,
Indore.

Mrs. Amiya Santra, c/o. Kishori Mohan Santra, Budge Budge.

Kumar Amiya Narayan Sanyal of Puthia Raj, Rajshahi, Bengal.

Kumar Sachindra Narayan Sanyal of Puthia Raj, Rajshahi, Bengal.

Mrs. Ambalal Sarabhai, Shahibagh, Ahmedabad.

Nalini Ranjan Sarkah, 6A, Corporation Street, Calcutta.

Lakshman Sahup, Professor, Oriental College, Lahore.

Binay Ranjan Sen, Indian Civil Serviee, Noakhali.

Ras Bihahi Sen, Delhi.

Bhupati Mohan Sen, Principal, Presidency College, Calcutta.

I. B. Sen, Bar-at-Law, 57/1, Harish Mukherjee Road, Bhowanipur, Calcutta.
Mrs. Mira Sen, C/o. Sudhir Kumar Sen, 32, Ghughu Danga Ljike, Baliganj,
Calcutta.

Dh. S. N. Sen, Meteorologist, Alipore Observatory, Calcutta.

Achalananda Sen Gupta, “Ramkali Bhaban,” Bankipore P.O., Patna Junction.
P. Sesh.adri, Principal, Sanatan Dharma College, Cawnpur.

Venkatarao C. Setalvad, B.A., LL.B., Setalv^d Road, Napean Sea, Bombay.
Arthur Mayce Seymore, Florida State College for Women, Tallahassee, Florida,
U.S.A.

Pandit Rajguru Hemraj Sharma, c.i.e., Dhokatol, Nepal.

Lord Aroon Sinha, 7, Lord Sinha Road, Calcutta.

Bahadur Singh Sinohi, 116, Lower Circular Road, Calcutta.

The Hon’ble Lieut.-Col. Bijay Prasad Singh, m.a., m.l.c.. Minister, Govern¬
ment of Bengal, Calcutta.

SuHRiD Chandra Sinha, Susang, Mymensingh, Bengal.

Mrs. Simanti Sinha, C/o Suhrid Chandra Sinha, Susang, Mymensingh.

The Hon’ble Mr. Susil K. Sinha, i.c.s.. Chief Presidency Magistrate, Calcutta.
His Highness Maharana Shri Daulat Sinhji, k.c.s.i., k.c.i.e., Thakore Saheb
of Limbdi, Kathiawar.

Rev, J. T. Sunderland, 1510, Cambridge Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A
The Hon’ble Sir Nripendra Nath Sircar, kt., Bar-at-Law, Advocate General,
Calcutta.

Lt.-Col. Dr. Hasan Suhrawardy, o.b.e., m.d., f.r.c.s.i., d.p.h., Vice-
Chancellor, University of Calcutta.

Praphulla Nath Tagore, Sheriff of Calcutta.

H. H. The Raja of Tehri-Garhwal State, Narendranagar, U.P,, India

Vieramadeo Varma, Raja Sahib, Jeypore, Vizagapatam District, Madras I^esy.

Thos. J, Watson, 270, Broadway, New York City, U.S.A.

Mrs. Annie Beard Woodhouse, 25, Broadway, Withington, Manchester.
William H. Woodin, 30, Church Street, New York City, U.S.A.

374

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